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The continued existence of the soul, the judgment after death, the rewards and punishments of the future state, were the constant subjects of Egyptian thought and art. But a truth may be hidden or thrown into the background by the intensity with which another truth is grasped.
We cannot punish by way of retribution, for no balance of ours is fine enough to weigh motives or to determine criminality. Our punishments can only be deterrent or reformatory, but this is by reason of our weakness. He has other objects in view. Current ideas of the love of God distort it by pitting it against His retributive righteousness.
There was, undeniably, a great evil and shame to be removed, but he was not responsible for it; and he left that evil in the hands of Him who said, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay," as He did repay in four years' devastations, miseries, and calamities, and these so awful, so unexpected, so ill-prepared for, that a thoughtful and kind-hearted person, in view of them, will weep rather than rejoice; for it is not pleasant to witness chastisements and punishments, even if necessary and just, unless the people who suffer are fiends and incarnate devils, as very few men are.
Perhaps some gentle-hearted but timid Puritan souls may have inwardly felt that the Indian wars, and the destructive fires, and the earthquakes, and the dead cattle, blasted wheat, and wormy peas, were not judgments of God for small ministerial pay and periwig-wearing, but punishments for the heartrending woes of the persecuted Quakers. Others than the poor Quakers spoke out in colonial meetings.
Let us now look at another phase; for menorrhagia and its consequences are not the only punishments that girls receive for being educated and worked just like boys. Nature's methods of punishing men and women are as numerous as their organs and functions, and her penalties as infinite in number and gradation as her blessings. Amenorrhoea is perhaps more common than menorrhagia.
The same is shown also by the fact that punishments are effected through the instrumentality of these; because they are of the nature of remedies, and it is the nature of remedies to be the contraries of the ills they cure. Virtue then is assumed to be that habit which is such, in relation to pleasures and pains, as to effect the best results, and Vice the contrary.
The real object of inquiry to human judicatures is the internal disposition; it is to this that they adapt the nature, and proportion the degree, of their punishments.
Scott, it is only where "the law is previously known" and not only so, but where the "circumstances which determine the effect might be foreseen" that "the pleasures or pains annexed to actions can properly be termed rewards and punishments;" for "these have reference to the state of mind of the party who is to be rewarded or punished; it is the intention or disposition of the mind, and not the mere act of the body, that is ever considered as obedience or disobedience, or thought worthy, in a moral sense, of either reward or punishment."
God divided the ten punishments decreed for Egypt into four parts, three of the plagues He committed to Aaron, three to Moses, one to the two brothers together, and three He reserved for Himself.
His punishments and the troubles of his childhood had always been associated with his father, and its pleasures and indulgences with his mother; but neither had made any very strong impression on Peter's mind, and it was of his father that he thought with most sympathy, and even most affection.
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