Excerpt from To Abolish Capital Punishment: A Plea to the Citizens of Every Country
Last night at Isis Theater, which was filled to its capacity, the whole audience save six responded to Katherine Tingley's appeal for a standing vote in support of resolutions for the abolishment of capital punishment.
In a stirring and eloquent appeal Katherine Tingley spoke right to the hearts of her audience and by the force of her arguments won them over to complete sympathy with her. The meeting was opened by the singing of songs, exquisitely rendered by the Raja-Yoga international chorus of some fifty voices, and the reading of appropriate quotations.
Following are extracts from Katherine Tingley's address:
"While we are in this atmosphere of music, of brotherly love, of compassion for all that lives, we are obliged to admit, if we think at all, that human society is morally bankrupt. The sooner thinking people of the present generation admit this the sooner will they reach a point of discernment whereby they can see things as they are and apply the remedy.
Society Morally Bankrupt
"How can you read your newspapers daily, as you do, and feel satisfied that all is well? How can the so-called Christians of the present age go to their prayers and to their homes satisfied? How can they do it? I ask this in love, with all due consideration for their beliefs: but I say, how can they do it? Is it not true, if we think well, that we have missed the real meaning of the teachings of Christ and of the sages of old? If we had them in their simplicity and clearness and force of spiritual life, we should not have to admit that society morally is bankrupt, and that the conditions of the world point to a degeneracy in human nature that one scarcely dares to think about.
"So when we take up the subject of capital punishment, before we look at it with unfriendly eyes, we must consider why it is that with all the so-called education, culture and the prosperity of the twentieth century, there is this great gap between ourselves and the unfortunates. Can you recall anything that Christ ever taught, or any of the Great Teachers, that could sustain you, or the people at large, in taking a position that because a man sins he is to be condemned? That because he has sinned he is to be punished through the laws of man? I find nothing in the teaching of Christ to support any such position.
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