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THE
CRIMINAL’S ASCENSION
A DISCOURSE
Given March 2nd 1879.
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY, M.A.
MINISTER OF SOUTH PLACE SOCIETY, AND AT THE
ATHENASUM, CAMDEN ROAD.
FRIGE TWOPENCE.
��THE CRIMINAL’S ASCENSION
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To a rational eye it would be difficult to picture a
more startling, scene than a man with the hangman on
one side preparing to strangle him, and a clergyman
on the other promising him bliss at God’s right hand.
But no eye can rationally take in at once a scene so
familiar. It requires patient analysis to discover the
full significance of a situation in which human society
by one officer decides that a man is unfit to live on
-earth, by another officer pronounces him quite fit for
the society of the beings it worships. In the majority
of modern executions, the gallows has been looked
upon by the criminals as a stepping-stone to eternal
glory; and no clerical voice have I ever heard denying
their probable ascension to Heaven. Theology still
represents a Christ saying to the malefactor, “ This
day shalt thou be with me in Paradise.” The old
story was recently repeated when an exceptionally
base criminal exclaimed, “ I am going to Heaven/’
�4
and the chaplain said, “Lord Jesus receive his soul.”
I am glad to observe that the public conscience is
shocked, and common sense recoils.
Such ever-recurring facts reveal a fearful chasm
dividing the practical needs of man from the alleged
requirements of God. They disclose the awful fact
that “religion” and morality use totally different
weights and measures. The vilest scoundrel to one
may be a saint to the other. What moral laws pro
nounce a life of villainy outraging man and woman,
“ religion ” says may be outweighed by a few moments
of prayer to God and compliments to Jesus.
I think it is not going too far to say that it is
impossible for the masses of a community to obtain
any apprehension of the real nature of crime, so longas the religious instruction provided for them teaches
that the supreme rewards of existence are attainable
without reference to life and character. It does not
materially affect the case that the Ten Commandments
are solemnly repeated. The power of any law to
control human passions depends on the sanctions it
carries; and these sanctions are penalties. A whole
code of mere remonstrances against theft were vain.
The Decalogue, so far as it is enacted law, is powerful
simply because a punishment is affixed to each com
mand. But if the Legislature should provide that
every individual violating any law might escape its.
�5
< penalty by kneeling before the Queen, it would be
equivalent to abrogation of the law. Society could
not exist under such conditions.
The moral sentiment of a community is not repre
sented by its lawyers, but chiefly by its religious
teachers. The law-books represent certain practical
interests of society which may be of moral importance,
but may not. One law preserves the life of a pheasant,
-another the life of a man; the same code punishes
fictitious offences, like fishing out of season, and
immoralities. It is a business-like matter, and, were
there no moral or religious sentiment, a man might
take his day of sport out of season, or his neighbour’s
property, and run his risk, and feel no worse morally
for either.
There are indeed moral forces that can supplement
social laws, forces that for some wield heavy rewards
and punishments. There are men and women who
live lives of honour, honesty, and virtue with as little
reference to the law-books as to any future world.
But, unfortunately, for the less refined but more
tempted masses of the world, all the moral induce
ments to self-control are rendered nugatory by a
sacred system which transfers the sanctions, the
■rewards or penalties, from moral action to a ceremony,
to a motion of the lips, to that last abjectness of
.arrested villainy called repentance.
�6
The voice most authentic to the masses says tothem,—In the name of God we declare to you that
no merits of your own are of any importance in His
eyes. He sees not as man seeth. Your thefts, murders,
adulteries, cruelties, and general baseness, may be to
man of vast importance; but to God the one question
is, do you believe in his Son or not ? If you do, the
crimes, scarlet to men, are to Him white as snow.
Shew by kneeling, praying, accepting Christ as your
' Saviour, that you are all square towards God, and it
matters little what the world says and does to you. What
need one care for men if God is for him, and Jesuswaiting to take him to His bosom ? Fear not them
that kill the body and after that have no more that
they can do, but fear Him who is able to cast both
soul and body into hell fire 1
Those who have been liberally instructed mayimagine
that I am stating too strongly the voice that goes forth
to the masses in the name of religion; but, in truth, I
am stating not only what is largely taught, but what is
the necessary sense of all teaching, however interlarded
with morality, which gives man as his highest end and
aim something unconnected with morality. However
disguised by and for the cultivated, to the masses it
must mean that at last. There is in every mind in the
country which has not out-grown it a formula called
the Plan of Salvation.
It is declared by every
�.7
church, every sect—substantially the same, under
superficial variations—to be a scheme formed by God
for raising man to angelic perfection, divine virtue,
eternal joy. And in this Plan of Salvation no provision
is made for morality. Not one item in it refers to
morality. Morality is not made a condition, nor im
morality a disqualification, for its full enjoyment. Its
conditions are confined to repentance for an ancient
personal offence—not a moral offence—committed by
Adam to his Maker, and an acceptance of a human
and divine sacrifice offered for that sin. It is a corol
lary of that Plan that no amount of crime can prevent
him who uses the charm from summoning the Holy
Ghost to his side, and enjoying all the favours which
God can bestow.
This Plan of Salvation may appear to you so irra
tional and immoral as to excite wonder how any one
can believe it, and doubt whether any human lives are
really practically guided by it. And this, indeed, is
the vital point. Our question is not whether this
notion of Salvation be really true, but whether it is
genuinely believed by those most tempted to evil, and
least surrounded by refined restraints. My own con
viction is that no system could be conceived more
exactly adapted to the rudimentary reason of the
ignorant, to the pauper sense of justice, and none can
so readily explain to the suffering masses the hard lot
�8
in which they are cast. In their hereditary disease
and despair, they have daily proof of hereditary sin;
the pedigree of their sorrow may as well go back to
Adam as to their grandfathers; they suffer for sins
' they never committed. And how shall they be saved?
Is it reasonable to say they can only be saved by being
moral, virtuous, honest, self-denying, truthful? Would
it be just in God to set on Heaven a price they cannot
pay ? By his decree their lot is amid ignorance, vice,
temptation, grossness; how then can he demand a
harvest where he has not sown ? The so-called Plan
of Salvation is an evolution out of ages of superstition
to meet just that low state of mind, that hard lot of
the ignorant and suffering, of which the intelligent and
the happy have little conception. High ethical science
has no meaning for them; but it appeals to their sense
: of right that their Maker should make Heaven as cheap
as earthly happiness is dear. It seems but fair to them
that one of the Godhead should bear the guilt of all
their sins, which grow out of that vile lot which the
Godhead arranged. They did not choose a life down
in the social mire. They do not feel the guilt of the
immoralities besetting that lot; and they listen favour: ably to the preaching which tells them they will go,
: like the penitent thief, straight from the prison or the
scaffold to the side of Jesus, there to be equals of the
proudest and greatest who despised them on earth.
�9
So runs a hymn—
“ Let the world despise and leave me,
Once they left my Saviour, too.”
In the course of its long experience, Roman
Catholicism had found the danger of this notion, and
the necessity of modifying the bold dogma of salvation
by faith alone, and had devised a purgatory. It said
to the evil man that he might be saved eventually,
however wicked, but in proportion to his bad conduct
would be the length and severity of his purification
after death. In the course of time, this dogma of
purgatory lost its value, deliverance from its pains
being offered for money, and Protestantism threw
away not only the theory but the experience of ages
which underlay it Protestantism offered the whole
world of men the indentical salvation, irrespective
of their merits or demerits.
Nay, we cannot disguise from ourselves, however
divines around us may try to disguise it from them
selves and us, that the logic of Protestant Christianity
goes even farther, and necessitates the position that
mere morality is a danger to the soul. The man of
cultivated reason has been found likely to trust his
reason ; the man of good works has a tendency to trust
to his good works ; and such have been proved less
amenable to the plan of trusting solely to the divine
scheme above reason and to the merits of Christ.
Under pressure of this experience, the sects have been
�IO
reduced to the necessity of building up their strength
from those less addicted to reason and to good works,
and have evolved the doctrine that God looks with
special favour on the mind that fancies itself humble
when it is only uninquiring, and the character which
confuses its weakness with dependence on Christ.
This positive discouragement of the formation of
. self-reliant and moral character has, unhappily, found
a means of diffusing itself which theology could not
command,—namely, by hymns. Those especially of |
sects that deal with the masses are pervaded with I
contempt of good works.
The Wesleyans sing—
‘ ‘ Let the world their virtue boast
Their works of righteousness;
*•
I, a wretch undone and lost,
Am freely saved by grace.
Other titles I disclaim ;
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This, only this, is all my plea—
I the chief of sinners am,
But Jesus died for me.”
This special claim to Jesus’s favour—that one. is L
the chief of sinners—has passed to many hymns, from I t
the Bible. Unhappily, there is much in the New
Testament, when detached from its own time and
place, to confirm the faith of the coarse and ignorant
in their miserable conceit. Their teachers have perverted the liberalism of Christ and Paul to these
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meanest ends. Christ, in trying to do away with the
bigotry around him, seeking to expand Jewish minds
so as to include Samaritans, Greeks, Romans, as
children of a divine Father, sought to win them to
charity by sweet parables. He told them of the mer
chant who paid so largely for the pearl ; and what
- pearl was more beautiful than Greece ? He told them
of how the woman rejoiced when she found the lost
coin, the shepherd when he found the lost lamb, the
father when his prodigal son returned. All these
were pictures of the hated Gentiles. They are our
lost sheep, taught Christ, our wandering brother; if
they will mingle with us, let us not repel them—rather
we will kill the fatted calf and make merry, because
the lost is found. And in his enthusiasm he may
have said, 11 There should be more joy in our new
kingdom over one such returning wanderer—one
fraternal Gentile—than over ninety-nine that never
went astray from the true God after images.” When
these poetic metaphors were written down in the
doctrinal period—in the Gospels—Jesus was more
than a hundred years dead, Jerusalem was destroyed,
the parables had lost their special point, and so the
moral was made universal and false by saying,“ There
is joy among the angels over one sinner that repenteth
more than over ninety-nine just persons who went
not astray,” a text either absurd, or a direct encourage
ment of vice.
�12
According to that text the roughs of England may
not only behold in that chief of sinners, who ascended
at Sheffield, a hero bold, who long defied Great
Britain, and, when overpowered, died happy, but they
may also see him causing an equal commotion among
the angels, though one of delight, as they leave the
humdrum souls who never went astray to rejoice over
this dear, daring, sensational fellow, whose salvation
illustrates the potency of divine magic so much better
than that of a mere moral man.
Paul has been put through the same process of per
version as Christ; his admirable statements for one
situation wrested for another, and stereotyped into
dogma. In furthering Christ’s broad inclusiveness j
Paul had to confront the new difficulty that his J ewish
brethren were disposed to insist on the Gentiles sub
mitting to their ceremonial law. They were willing
i
to receive the Gentiles as returning prodigals, but
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they must consent to obey all the regulations of the
father s house that is, the house of Israel. To this
the Gentiles would not submit; and it cost Paul the
labours of a life, and all his resources of eloquence
and art, to persuade the Jewish wing that a common
faith in Christ was all-sufficient without exacting from
Greeks and Romans the deeds of the law—that is, of
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course, the rites and ceremonial deeds of the Jewish
religion, circumcision and the like. When this argu-
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ment was detached from its point and purpose, when
it was read letter by letter by the eye of bibliolatry—
as little able to see its whole meaning as a fly the
statue over which it creeps—Paul’s “ deeds of the
law” were supposed to be the moral law—English
law; not circumcision and Sabbath, but laws against
theft and violence; and so Paul was brought at last
to sanction the dogma that men are saved by faith in
Christ, without requiring any good deeds, or con
formity with human laws.
It is greatly to the credit of human nature that this
.kind of teaching has not utterly corrupted Christian
society. If human nature had been half as bad as
theology says, the Christian name would to foreigners
have been synonymous with barbarism. But a great
many influences have intervened between the dogmas
and large numbers of the people—the saving grace of
common sense, pictures of virtue and vice on the
stage—these and other forces too complex to be now
considered have supplied some counterpoise to dogmas
that despise human merit. But there is a yet very
large class which may be called the potential criminal
.class—and against that class society is left with no
defence but that of superior force. It is a. war for
■advantages to the burglar, the murderer, in which he
:may be defeated, but in which he does not feel much
/disgrace or guilt, if any. His life is being lived in a
�general way under the necessity that knows no law,
and particular crimes are mere accidents in the
current that masters him. And he will remain somastered—without conscious responsibility or guilt—■
until a will is stimulated within him by some motive
of action stronger than that which tempts him. Now,
what is to stimulate in a person of strong appetites
the will to control those appetites ? Remember, our
problem now is not that of punishing crime, but of
how to keep people from committing crime. Can
Christianity do that ? What are the motives to which
it appeals ? Judgment Day and eternal Hell ? Now,
these would be very strong if they were penalties for
immorality, but Christianity repudiates that idea.
Hell it declares is for those who forget God, or donot believe on his Son. Consequently the criminal
may snap his fingers at the Day of Judgment. Hell
is a mere display of fireworks to the man who is
insured against it by the blood of Jesus. Charles
Peace, on the morning of execution, arose from
pleasant sleep, breakfasted heartily, then sat down and
wrote as follows :—“ To my dear wife and family,—I
tell you this great joy that I could not tell you yesterday.
No fear now, for it is all cleared up as to where I
am going to. I am going to heaven, or to the place
where the good go to that die in the Lord; or where
is the place appointed by God for the good to wait
�i5
until the resurrection of the dead. So do not forget!
Our meeting place is in heaven. So do come at the
last and you will find me there. This letter is wrote25 minutes before I die, so I must say good bye to
all. I am going to heaven.” A few moments after
he is on the scaffold preaching to the reporters, says
he is going to rest with the good till Judgment
Day, forgives his enemies, and says, “ I wish them tocome to the Kingdom, to die as I die.” That is hisbest wish for us all, to die as he died ! And that iswhat Judgment Day and Hell amounted to in the
eyes of this criminal. But what other motives canChristianity arouse now that it has enabled the criminal
to quench Hell with a drop of Christ’s blood? It
may say that it sets before him the life of Christ,—the perfect life,—-and so makes an affecting appeal toall the good in him. Be like Christ, it says. But that
ideal too it destroys by declaring Christ to be God.
The criminal is not a god. The virtues of a god are no
example to him. So far as Christ was a man his expe
riences are not attractive. We are now in Lent, and
Christendom recalls a poor man wandering in a wilder
ness 40 days, cold and hungry, resisting all temptations,
to get his living by evil ways. From a loaf of bread to
the kingdoms of the world, all the temptations were
offered him and resisted. What did he get by it ?*
A gallows. He might, to the criminal mind, he-
�i6
might well envy the happy end of our latest ruffian.
One sacrificed himself for others, and at execu
tion cried, “ My God, why hast thou forsaken me ?”
the other sacrificing others to himself, exclaims, “1
.am going to heaven.” So far as the virtuous, selfsacrificing, human life of Christ is concerned the re
ligion called after him goes into the criminal’s prison,
and in a few moments enables him to show vice tri.umphant, beside virtue agonizing on the cross of its
own Saviour. So it is on earth; and Christianity
.assures the criminal, converted after he can sin no
more, that heaven has the same place and rewards
for the life of crime and the life of virtue. He gets
.after a life of evil just what Christ gets after a life of
moral excellence. There are many Christians who
me moral, many who are wiser than their creed, but
-they cannot alter the remorseless logic of their
system. Either it is the blood of Jesus that saves
men or it is not. If man is saved by the sacrifice
and merits of Jesus, then he cannot be saved by his
-own merits or sacrifices. Consequently, so far as
eternal bliss and blessedness are concerned, he may
do without any merits or morality at all.
And in this claim, the very basis of Christ’s atone
ment, lies the fact that the criminal mind finds in
rthe orthodox system precisely its own method. For
what is the criminal mind ? It is a mind which seeks
�to gain advantages without working for them,—that
.it is, without fulfilling the conditions with which justice-
'di to others surrounds them. The criminal mind seeks
iri nothing that may not be fairly sought. This miser
able man, just executed, wanted beauty in dress, a
He:ai is quite credible when he declared that he never
fit? harmed living creature except when they were inter
fering with his appropriation of things he desired.
No man loves crime for itself. But the moral law>
says you must seek these things by patiently working
reft for them, not by snatching in a moment that for5
W which others have toiled, enriching yourself throughiiil the merits of others, or by sacrificing their lives to
ey your own happiness. But the criminal may point to
M a law holier than morality; to every Christian creed
iw which is on his side. Just as he gets his neighbour’smljewellery without toil, so is he to get paradise. Without
)fn| money and without price is he to attain the bliss of
eternity. By a great human sacrifice he is enabledj Oil to dispense with all toilsome conditions and
enjoy
jibj the celestial raiment and rubies that represent theheaven of every criminal’s dream—everything pretty
ms and pleasant, and no work to obtain them.
I
The essential superstition represented by the crimiteiil nal’s ascension to the right hand of God, by divine
aig grace, is as gross as anything among the Zulus. When
Sfi neat wagonette and horses, violins, and money.
�i8
'the chaplain, said, “Lord Jesus, receive his soul,” it
either meant that the vulgarest and meanest murderer
was a fit companion for Christ; or else it meant that
■a miracle was to be then and there wrought, and
villainy at once transmuted to perfection. The ascen
sion of the dead body through prison walls would be
no greater miracle than the ascension of that evil
mind to any realm of purity.
It is a superstition to suppose that animal had any
soul. Nevertheless, he might have had one had he
been born in a world that had made the best instead
■of the worst of him. From first to last his “ career,”
■as he grandly called it, reflects the unreason which
from the past has come to bind the present. A pre
tended religion turns his earthly life to a transient
trifle under the eternity to come ; and tells him that
his good or evil deeds here are equally unimportant;
•that heaven is had for the asking. Had religion told
him the truth, that this life is the only one he is sure
of, and that it is the only possible life he could have,
unless he developed moral powers useful elsewhere,
he might have ascended from animalism to manhood.
When this solemn sanction of his indolence and
worthlessness have borne their evil fruit, the law pro
ceeds to make him a hero, the sensation of months.
Biographies of him, reminiscences of him, myths and
legends, accounts of his down-sitting and up-rising;
�19
and all because he is slain like some formidable
prisoner of war. “ I want you, sir,” he said to the
clergyman, “to preach a special sermon over my case
. . . to hold me and my career up as a beacon ”—
such is his grand phraseology—“ that all who see may
avoid my example.” But is that the effect of his emi
nence ? Thousands of the wretched around us now see
how their obscure lives may achieve fame. As the
Saturday Review said, no statesman, author or artist
could hope to receive such obsequious attention at
death. Whereas it had been easy to put that man in
a particoloured dress with a chain gang, paving roads
for honest men, and make him a living witness to the
criminal’s disgrace and degradation, as he now is of
the criminal’s glory and ascension. He said, “ I hope
God will give me strength to go like a hero to the
scaffold. I had much rather die than live in penal
servitude.” Why not, when death meant ascension
to glory, and the other meant just that hard work it
was the aim of his life to avoid. Years ago he at
tempted suicide to escape a term of hard labour. I have
no sentiment about the death of such people, except
that I believe such death too good for them. My ob
jection is not sentimental, but scientific. It is a terrible
error for society to suppose that swift death is the
severest punishment. The Bible represents Satan as
believing that all that a man hath he will give for his
�20
life; but that was written by a people who believed
in no future life, and it was said about a man who had
a great deal to lose. But our criminals come of classes
to whom earth means poverty and misery, and heaven
means luxurious idleness. It is a great error to believe
that death is the chief deterrent to these. The main
terror of it fled when theology allowed salvation to alL
That was the practical abolition of hell. It has pro
claimed to the scoundrel world that it may cheat men
in this life, and then cheat the devil in the next. It
has added to the criminal’s morbid satisfaction in
creating a sensation, the assurance of ascension to
heaven by a more painless death than Charles Peace
had twice sought by his own act.
Waterlew & Sons Limited, Printers, London Wall, London.
�
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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The criminal's ascension : a discourse given March 2nd 1879
Creator
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Conway, Moncure Daniel [1832-1907.]
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 20 p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Printed by Waterlow and Sons, London Wall. Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 2.
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[Waterlow and Sons]
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[1879]
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G3344
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Crime
Evil
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (The criminal's ascension : a discourse given March 2nd 1879), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
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English
Crime and Punishment
Crime-Religious Aspects-Christianity
Good and Evil
Morris Tracts
Salvation
Social Problems