Swift-Winged Penalties.
It was always terribly dangerous to commit a crime. "Be sure your sin will find you out" is a saying more than three thousand years old. The truth it expresses is as old as the human race, as old as Cain and Eve.
But to-day, with all the resources of modern science trained upon wrongdoers, the ways of the transgressor are doubly hard. For example, here is a newspaper clipping telling how, down in Florida, two of the most recent marvels of science combined to bring a fugitive to justive. He was a hotel employee who had stolen some jewelry and had escaped with his spoil on board a boat. The boat got out to sea before the loss was discovered, and the presence of the thief on board was known. At once the hotel authorities, by means of the wireless telegraph, communicated with the ship's captain, made sure that the thief was on board, and learned that the boat was detained off Cape Florida by low tide. Then the pilot of a Curtiss flying-boat was called in, set off in the air in spite of a rainstorm, and dropped down in the sea alongside the boat in less than half an hour. A detective was on the hydroplane. He quickly made his arrest and flew back to the hotel with his prisoner, the entire flight occupying less than an hour.
With the empty air whispering his secret, and with pursuers dropping down upon him out of the clouds, the wrongdoer of to-day is certainly hard pressed.
Let us rejoice in it all. Let us continue to make it as difficult as possible to do wrong and as easy as possible to do right. Machinery will never make character, however; and, though all the mysteries of the physical world are laid bare, it still will remain true that "out of the heart are the issues of life."
Their Own Executioners.
The three New York anarchists who were blown up by the premature explosion of bombs which they were manufacturing with the purpose of blowing up other men furnish a useful parable.
Would that we could be sure of a similar fate for every other enemy of the public.
Would that the purveyors of vile literature could smother themselves in the foulness in which they deal.
Would that the whiskey-sellers could be compelled to consume all of their vile concoctions.
Would that the makers of indecent moving pictures could be reeled off on their own machines.
Would that the cruel employers of child labor could be sentenced to take for life the places of their child slaves.
A few substitutions of this kind would reform the world.
The "Wireless" of the Universe.
The imagination of the entire world was seized by the startling use of wireless telegraphy in bringing about the arrest of Dr. Hawley H. Crippen and his typist. Crippen, charged with the brutal murder of his wife, slipped through the fingers of the English police, and for more than two weeks the entire world searched for them. Newspapers everywhere printed accounts of the revolting crime, and, in most cases, pictures of the man and the girl. It was supposed that they had sought escape by means of one of the transatlantic steamers and search was therefore made of every ship crossing the ocean, rigid scrutiny being given to all passengers as they landed in America.
Finally Captain Kendall, of the Canadian Pacific steamer Montrose, became suspicious of a "Rev. John Robinson" and "John Robinson, Jr." among his passengers and sent his suspicions by wireless to the English police. His minute description of the two made it certain that he had found the fleeing pair, who were from that minute kept under constant watch, though they did not suspect it. By a faster steamer an officer from Scotland Yard got across the Atlantic before the Montrose, boarded the latter steamer with the pilot, and took "Rev. John Robinson" and "John Robinson, Jr.," into custody before they reached land.
This was the first time the wireless telegraph had definitely brought about the capture of persons fleeing from the law. The event also illustrated the tremendous power of the modem newspaper as a detective agency. The combination of the two reduces the entire inhabited world to a neighborhood, and flings around criminals a net from which they cannot hope to escape.
And yet all this boasted modern outfit of ours is only a feeble imitation of the detective power of God. The Scotland Yard of the universe is carried in the breast of the criminal himself. The "wireless" of the universe is worked by the currents of the criminal's own nerves. Conan Doyle never wrote a detective story so thrilling and marvelous as that condensed, within the experience of multitudes of sinners, into the four words, "Thou God seest me."
"Whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me."
The Cat in the Garden.
I have been putting in my vegetable seeds. The process always develops unexpected difficulties, in my case at least, but this year the difficulty was one of large dimensions. It was our cat.
We have had cats for years. We had this cat last year. But this is the first time the particular difficulty to which I refer has occurred.
Our cat suddenly has come to fancy clawing the earth, and walking around in it, and sitting down on it. Of course he has done that before. All cats like to do it. But this year it has become a passion.
I will spade up a portion of the garden, break up the soil into fine particles, rake it into a smooth bed, make my trenches and plant my seeds, covering them nicely over and firming the ground over them, and will go away, leaving the promising blank surface happily to the sun and the showers.
And, alas, to the cat!
I will come back the next day only to find that bed a pandemonium, scratched into great holes, and all the work to do over again, to say nothing of the loss of the seeds.
I tried stretching mosquito-netting over the drills. The cat got on the mosquito-netting and drove it deep into the soil in a series of humps and holes. That cat is a heavy animal. Also, he is not easily balked.
I tried covering the beds with brush. The cat took the brush as a challenge. Was some foe concealed underneath? He found out.
Then I tried driving posts at each corner of the bed and winding string around the whole, yards upon yards of it, and then over the top, back and forth, till I had made an enclosure of string. I knew, of course, that the cat could get through that frail barrier, but I hoped he would take the hint. Not he.
This morning I was at work in the garden when I saw him push his way into that string enclosure and make havoc in my best bed, where neat rows of beets and parsnips were already pushing their green exploring fingers through the soil.
This was my chance to teach that cat a lesson, and I sprung after him.
With a leap that left more havoc behind him, he fled, and I pursued. Across the yard and into the cellar. Through the cellar and up stairs into the kitchen. Through the kitchen and into the summer kitchen. There I had him, for the outside door was shut.
I was not angry with the cat. He is a fine fellow. He did not know he was doing wrong; how could he? And why should he be punished for doing what he did not know to be wrong?
And yet here was a practical problem: how, unless he was punished, could he know that it was wrong to go under string enclosures and trample on garden-beds? Cat intelligence is very good in its way, but I might talk all day to that cat, and explain with care the difference between ground that is soft and ground that is hard, and ground that has string around it and ground that has not, and at the end of the day that cat would have been no atom the wiser. How could I teach him a lesson? Obviously, in no other way than by punishing him. So I did it.
He was not hurt, except in his feelings. I simply gave him a few very emphatic pats that he could not mistake for caresses. Then I took him into the garden and held him, violently kicking, while I repaired the damage as best I could. Then I let him go and he flew into hiding, evidently feeling his disgrace.
And as I went on with my work in the garden I wondered to myself whether God is not sometimes driven to similar ways of teaching us stupid creatures, whose intelligence is so far below His own that it must be a matter of extreme difficulty, often, to get into our minds at all what must be to Him the simplest of truths. We run under the strings, which are the laws of the universe and we must be taught not to; and often suffering is the only way. I will remember this the next time I have a headache or a heartache.
Sin Slays.
A Boston newspaper tells of a woman in a suburb of the city who looked out of her window and saw the body of a boy lying in a near-by field. It proved to be that of a fifteen-year-old lad who had been seen the night before by a policeman, with two other boys, stealing milk from a milk depot. This boy ran away, while one of his comrades was caught; but in running away with a bottle of milk or cream the lad fell on the bottle, which broke, and the glass cut him so deeply that he bled to death.
The pitiful story is a perfect parable of sin. Every sin is a bottle, which we hug to us. We think it is full of something good. We look forward to enjoying it. Then we stumble; every sinner stumbles. We find that our sin has a sharp edge. With a keen pang we discover that our sin has cut into our life. We fall fainting, and our life oozes away through the wound that our sin has made.
It is safe to say that neither of the more fortunate boys will steal milk again; probably they will avoid all such folly in the future. But perhaps they will not; for do not their elders constantly witness the tragic results of sin, and still hug it to their bosoms?