Note 65 — AIDS TO REFLECTION IN THE FORMATION OF A MANLY CHARACTER, ON THE SEVERAL GROUNDS OF PRUDENCE, MORALITY, AND RELIGION. (continued 3)
Reading edition
In a leaf of corrections to the text of the first edition Coleridge directed that "prerogative as moral beings" should be read here. The correction seems to have been overlooked by Coleridge's editors.—Ed.
[66] On this principle alone is it possible to justify capital, or ignominious punishments (or indeed any punishment not having the reformation of the Criminal, as one of its objects). Such punishments, like those inflicted on Suicides, must be regarded as posthumous: the wilful extinction of the moral and personal life being, for the purposes of punitive Justice, equivalent to a wilful destruction of the natural life. If the speech of Judge Burnet to the horse-stealer (You are not hanged for stealing a horse; but, that horses may not be stolen) can be vindicated at all, it must be on this principle; and not on the all-unsettling scheme of Expedience, which is the anarchy of Morals.
[67] The religion of the Dutch sect called the "Family of Love," originated by Henry Nicholas about 1540.—Ed.
[68] More's 'Mystery of Godliness.'—Ed.