11 NOVEMBER 1871, Page 3

We have a sort of impulse to protest against the

way in which the murderer of the late Justice Norman was executed in Calcutta. He was hanged, and his body then burned by low-cage men, the object of the second operation being so to scatter his ashes that when Azrael, the Angel of Death, comes to summon sinners to judgment, ho may not be able to find him. The soul, of course, gets no harm, and the process is legal, having been ordered by statute to meet fanatical assassinations, but there is something out- side Christianity altogether in the impression of vindictiveness it is intended to create. We cannot execute soul as well as body, and we protest in the name of our creed against pretending that we can. An act of demoniac cruelty is not a bit the better for being a lie as well.