It is much to be lamented, that nations, professing Christianity, should
have lost sight, in their various acts of legislation, of Christian
principles: or that they should not have interwoven some such beautiful
principles as those, which we have seen adopted by the Quakers, into the
system of their penal laws. But if this negligence or omission would
appear worthy of regret, if reported of any Christian nation, it would
appear most so, if reported of our own, where one would have supposed,
that the advantages of civil and religious liberty, and those of a
reformed religion, would have had their influence is the correction of
our judgments, and in the benevolent dispositions of our will. And yet
nothing is more true, than that these good influences have either never
been produced, or, if produced, that they have never been attended to,
upon this subject. There seems to be no provision for religions
instruction in our numerous prisons. We seem to make no patient trials
of those, who are confined in them, for their reformation. But, on the
other hand, we seem to hurry them off the stage of life, by means of a
code, which annexes death to two hundred different offences, as if we
had allowed our laws to be written by the bloody pen of the pagan Draco.
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