‘No, that is not so,’ said Pamphilius, ‘and if you really examine the results of our teaching and of our lives carefully and impartially, you will see that not only do they not lead to murder, robbery, and violence, but on the contrary those crimes can only be opposed by the means we practise. Murder, robbery, and all evils, existed long before Christianity, and men have always contended with them, but unsuccessfully, because they employed means that we deplore, meeting violence by violence; and this never checks crime, but on the contrary provokes it by sowing hatred and exasperation.
‘Look at the mighty Roman Empire. Nowhere else is such trouble taken about the laws as in Rome. Studying and perfecting the laws constitutes a special science. The laws are taught in the schools, discussed in the Senate, and reformed and administered by the most educated citizens. Legal justice is considered the highest virtue, and the office of Judge is held in peculiar respect. Yet in spite of this it is known that there is now no city in the world so steeped in crime and corruption as Rome. Remember Roman history: in olden times when the laws were very primitive the Roman people possessed many virtues, but in our days, despite the elaboration and administration of law, the morals of the citizens are becoming worse and worse. The number of crimes constantly increases, and they become more varied and more elaborate every day.
‘Nor can it be otherwise. Crime and evil can be successfully opposed only by the Christian method of love, and not by the heathen methods of revenge, punishment, and violence. I am sure you would like men to abstain from evil voluntarily and not from fear of punishment. You would not wish men to be like prisoners who only refrain from crime because they are watched by their gaolers. But no laws or restrictions or punishments make men averse to doing evil or desirous of doing good. That can only be attained by destroying evil at its root, which is in the heart of man. That is what we aim at, while you only try to repress the outward manifestations of evil. You do not look for its source and do not know where it is, and so you can never find it.
‘The commonest crimes – murder, robbery, and fraud – are the result of men’s desire to increase their possessions, or even to obtain the necessaries of life which they have been unable to procure in any other way. Some of these crimes are punished by the law, but the most important and far-reaching in their consequences are perpetrated under the wing of the law, as, for instance, the huge commercial frauds and the innumerable ways in which the rich rob the poor. Those crimes which are punished by law may indeed to a certain extent be repressed – or rendered more difficult of execution – and the criminals for fear of punishment become more prudent and cunning and invent new forms of crime which the law does not punish. But by leading a Christian life a man preserves himself from all these crimes, which result on the one hand from the struggle for money and possessions, and on the other from the unequal concentration of riches in the hands of the few. Our one way of checking theft and murder is to keep for ourselves only as much as is indispensable for life, and to give to others all the superfluous products of our toil. We Christians do not lead men into temptation by the sight of accumulated wealth, for we rarely possess more than enough for our daily bread. A hungry man, driven to despair and ready to commit a crime for a piece of bread, if he comes to us will find all he wants without committing any crime, because that is what we live for – to share all we have with those who are cold and hungry. And the result is that one sort of evil-doer avoids us, while others turn to us, give up their criminal life, and are saved, and gradually become workers labouring for the good of all.
‘Other crimes are prompted by the passions of jealousy, revenge, carnal love, anger and hatred. Such crimes cannot be suppressed by law. A man who commits them is in a brutal state of unbridled passion; he is incapable of reflecting on the consequences of his actions, opposition only exasperates him, and so the law is powerless to restrain these crimes. We however believe that man can find satisfaction and the meaning of life only in the spirit, and that as long as he serves his passions he can never find happiness. We curb our passions by a life of love and labour, and develop in ourselves the power of the spirit, and the more deeply and widely our faith spreads the rarer will crime inevitably become.
