The Question of Old-Fashioned Theology [excerpt]

We have not yet learned a whole-hearted tenderness toward human suffering. We [140][141] have improved somewhat, no doubt. We have learned a good many fine lessons of mutual dependence and help. Our hospitals, asylums, and infirmaries of many sorts register our advance from a day in which weakness and incapacity were the objects of nameless crimes. Modern sentiment would not tolerate for a moment the overbearing and brutishness of former ages. Hospital nurses will work all night trying to keep the breath of life in some tiny foundling whose own mother has left it to die, and which, if it lives, can only become a public ward. The execution of a human hound like Czolgosz must not be attended with any vindictive cruelty or horrors. You recall the howl of protest which went up during the progress of the Spanish-American war at the use of explosive bullets. Notwithstanding all which growth of altruistic sentiment throughout the world, it is still hard for the individual to be considerate toward all phases of suffering. Men are still too [141][142] much like the herd in which, when one is down, all the rest turn to and gore him. There is an almost irresistible impulse to kick a dead dog.