And it shall be, that he that is taken with the devoted thing shall be burnt with fire, he and all that he hath: because he hath transgressed the covenant of the Lord, and because he hath wrought folly in Israel.- Jos_7:15.
1. Only one thing more remained to be done. They led forth the wretched man, with all his household, and all that belonged to them, and all Israel stoned him. And then they burned the dead body, and buried all beneath a heap of stones, alike as a memorial and as a warning. But the valley they named “the valley of Achor,” or trouble, while the echoes of that story sounded through Israel's history to latest times, in woe and in weal, for judgment and for hope. It seems a terrible punishment; but Achan had already brought defeat and disgrace on his countrymen. He had robbed God, and brought the whole community to the brink of ruin. He had brought disaster on the nation, and shame and ruin on himself and his house. In all coming time, he must stand in the pillory of history as the man who stole the forbidden spoil of Jericho. That disgraceful deed is the only thing that will ever be known of him.
Say what some may, the World is progressing, and part of the progress is shown in our conceptions of the true punishment of sin.1 [Note: H. B. Garrod, Dante, Goethe's Faust, and other Lectures, 88.]
All true justice is vindictive to vice, as it is rewarding to virtue. Only-and herein it is distinguished from personal revenge-it is vindictive of the wrong done;-not of the wrong done to us. It is the national expression of deliberate anger, as of deliberate gratitude; it is not exemplary, or even corrective, but essentially retributive; it is the absolute art of measured recompense, giving honour where honour is due, and shame where shame is due, and joy where joy is due, and pain where pain is due. It is neither educational, for men are to be educated by wholesome habit, not by rewards and punishments; nor is it preventive, for it is to be executed without regard to any consequences; but only for righteousness' sake, a righteous nation does judgment and justice.2 [Note: Ruskin, Lectures on Art, iii. § 90.]
2. But if it be awful to contemplate the death, and the mode of death, of Achan, how much more when we think that his wife and his sons and his daughters were stoned to death along with him. Israel had not in these early days learned how to distinguish the guilty man from his innocent family, and the man whose covetousness had first caused the death of nearly forty of his countrymen now involved in his punishment his own children and his very cattle. No doubt the Israelites thought they had the sanction of God for these and like enormities. They thought they were appeasing His anger by stoning and burning the innocent with the guilty. They thought that He was well pleased with this monstrous offering. But that was because they did not know Him. They had only just emerged from heathenism, and had brought with them into their new life no little of the old leaven. They had been accustomed to believe that God was cruel, vindictive, delighting in bloody sacrifices and the slaughter of His enemies, and this clung to them more or less for a thousand years, in spite of all their revelations, until Christ showed them God's true face, and the old leaven was at last purged out.
While holding it to be impossible for men to know the absolute truth about heavenly things, Browning yet believed that knowledge was vouchsafed to us “according to the measure of a man.” Upon this view, his highest ideal, while not indeed giving a complete picture of God as He is, yet represents Him “in such conception as my mind allows.”
Here by the little mind of man reduced
To littleness that suits his faculty.
This revelation of Him is confessedly inadequate, and therefore in a sense false; but it is nevertheless more fitting to say that God is the highest that we can conceive and more, than to say that He is not what we conceive Him to be. For man's mind is a mirror which displays His glory on a diminished scale, just as an “optic glass” draws the sun's rays together, and reveals “the very sun in little,” reduced to a mere pin-point circle, yet “all the same comprising the sun's self.” Pope Innocent, who more than any character seems to speak for Browning, is only expressing this thought under a slightly different form, when he asks,
Man's mind, what is it but a convex glass,
Wherein are gathered all the scattered points
Picked out of the immensity of sky,
To reunite there, be our heaven for earth,
Our known unknown, our God revealed to men?
This view that reality is partially represented in thought, is, for Browning, bound up with the further doctrine that the representation of it is continually growing more complete. “An absolute vision,” he says, “is not for this world, but we are permitted a continual approximation to it.” Our destiny is to “creep ever on from fancies to the fact,” as
Truth successively takes shape one grade above
Its last presentment.
Man, therefore, thus conditioned must expect
He could not, what he knows now, know at first;
What he considers that he knows to-day,
Come but to-morrow, he will find misknown;
Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns
Because he lives, which is to be a Man_1:1 [Note: A. C. Pigou, Robert Browning as a Religious Teacher, 20.]
