The colonel says, ‘Dear, wise friend, you have spoken correctly and well; but what am I, as a stranger, to say about this? I now believe and am convinced in my innermost being that this Jesus of Nazareth is none other than the very true God in human form. And it is not so much the great signs He performed that tell me this, but far more His boundless wisdom! For whoever wishes to create a world must be as wise as He is in each of His words.
‘But these scoundrels here most wickedly call themselves God’s children, to whom God had spoken at all times either indirectly or directly. And now He Himself comes to them bodily, and they scorn Him like a street ruffian and even drive Him out of the city! Friend, I am a Roman, by my religion a crippled pantheist, thus a blind heathen, and I believe and stand for this new faith of mine with my life.
‘If these were heathens here, I would have forbearance with them. But because they call themselves God’s children and so abuse God, who is supposed to be their eternal Father, I as a stranger can have no forbearance with them!
‘They wanted to expel God the Lord; now they shall be expelled! The vermin and weeds must go, so that pure fruit may flourish in this field, which the Lord Himself has now cultivated. For if the weeds remain here, they will soon spoil everything the Lord Himself has sown here so splendidly. But tell me quite honestly: am I right or not? What must mean more to me, the Lord or this miserable street rabble?’
Jonael says, ‘That you are entirely right from such a standpoint no one can or will deny you. But whether something like this is necessary immediately is quite another question. It may be that these evildoers, now frightened beyond measure, will look within themselves, repent of their wrongdoing and reform completely; and then it would surely not be right to expel them all. For a sin remains punishable in a person only as long as he persists in it. But if the person lays sin aside completely and enters into the order established by God, then sin and its punishment have nothing more to do with people!
‘But to punish a completely reformed person because in his blind folly and weakness he had formerly sinned once or several times would be the crown of absurdity, entirely unworthy of a true human being and against all divine order. Such punishment would resemble to a hair the action of a foolish physician who, after his patients had recovered, went to them and said, “You have now indeed become completely healthy; but you also see that your flesh, and specifically this and that limb, has sinned against you and must therefore now be chastised in proportion to how much or little it afflicted you!” Now if those who have recovered let their flesh, which has scarcely become healthy again, be chastised with all kinds of torture, or are tortured by force, what will become of their recovery? Look, they will afterward become ten times sicker than they were before! The question is: what good, then, was such untimely chastisement of the flesh? Is the treatment itself not already sufficient chastisement of the flesh? Why then an additional chastisement that makes healthy flesh sick again? But if such conduct must already be called exceedingly foolish in material things, how much more so when it is practiced without any sparing upon the spiritual human being!
‘It is indeed our duty to draw the attention of people who have sinned and then reformed completely to the great dangers of sin in a brotherly way, but also to strengthen and fortify them in their reformed state with everything at our disposal, so that they may never relapse into the bondage of sin. But to call them to account and punish them when reformed would mean nothing other than drawing reformed sinners back into sins ten times greater and worse!
‘And the question is whether such conduct would not be a hundred times more punishable in God’s sight than all the sins previously committed by those punished! Believe me, the punishment every sin already carries with it is a medicine against the ailment of the soul called sin. But if the ailment has been removed through the medicine already placed within it, why then further medicine where no ailment remains?’ The colonel says, ‘As a preventive against a possible renewed outbreak of the ailment!’
Jonael says, ‘Yes, yes, preventives are good and necessary; but as I said before, they must be of a strengthening and fortifying kind, not a weakening or even killing kind. Wrath is never softened through wrath, but only through love, gentleness and patience!
‘One must pour water over someone who is burning, not boiling pitch or even glowing molten metal! Someone who has broken a leg should be carried, his broken leg set and bandaged, and he should be laid in a proper bed so that the fracture can heal. But one should not beat him with clubs because he was so clumsy in walking that he fell and broke his leg!
‘Not very long ago I had an account from someone who had returned from Scythia, where he had gone to proclaim the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to those people. He told me that these wild, continually wandering peoples punish a person, when he has died, for having died! They would perhaps strip him completely, then bind him naked to a stake and scourge him for an entire day. This would also be done to the dead man if he had been killed by another, for he alone supposedly bore the blame, since he had let himself be overcome and finally even killed! The killer, on the other hand, would be praised for having defeated the other and preserved his life.
‘But however foolish this may sound, it is entirely like us if by some action we wish to make a person who is already spiritually dead through sin, which is a true sickness of the soul, still deader than he already is!
‘A sick person certainly needs a physician and the right medicine; but to punish him because he had the misfortune to become sick—that, dear friend, would belong in deepest Scythia! I think you will now see that it is better to follow the Lord of life in everything than to act ahead of Him in anything with coarse, clumsy hands and thereby ruin the great divine plant nursery, either wantonly like the devils or certainly out of sheer stupidity!’