This is unbelievable! You will truly be amazed at how much insight C.S. Lewis had into the hearts of men, and how much forsight he had regarding modern society. He wrote this over 50 years ago, and it is more relevant now than it was when he wrote it. Go figure!
Pardoned
The essential act of mercy was to pardon; and pardon in its very essence involves the recognition of guilt and ill-desert in the recipient. If crime is only a disease which needs cure, not sin which deserves punishment, it cannot be pardoned. How can you pardon a man for having a gumboil or a club foot? But the Humanitarian theory wants simply to abolish Justice and substitute Mercy for it. This means that you start being "kind" to people before you have considered their rights, and then force upon them supposed kindnesses which no one but you will recognize as kindnesses and which the recipient will feel as abominable cruelties. You have overshot the mark. Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful. That is the important paradox. As there are plants which will flourish only in mountain soil, so it appears that Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crannies of the rock of Justice: transplanted to the marshlands of mere Humanitarianism, it becomes a man-eating weed, all the more dangerous because it is still called by the same name as the mountain variety.
C. S. LEWIS in God in the Dock
Quoted in The Quotable Lewis edited by Wayne Martindale and Jerry Root (Tyndale House) p 426
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