There is a growing disposition in some quarters to look on every criminal as an unsound person having a special neurosis; to discover, diagnostic evidence of the criminal nature in the conformation of the head and face, and in defective structure of brain; and to demand in consequence that criminals should not be punished as responsible, but treated as diseased, beings. It is a tendency against which, in the interests of true psychology, a timely protest may well be made; for its interests cannot in the end be served by pretensions to a knowledge which it is far from possessing and by unwarrantable claims to authority based upon such pretensions. If all criminals are, as the theory postulates, of defective or diseased mental organization, we must needs go on to acknowledge that few, if any, persons are well formed or sound mentally. Every Christian who listens reverently to the reading of the Ten Commandments and prays devoutly that God will incline his heart to keep them, feels, or ought to feel if he be in earnest, that he has in him the potentiality of committing every crime or sin forbidden by them. That he does not commit a particular crime which another person does is not owing always to a stronger and better nature in him, nor to an opportune infusion of prevenient grace, but to the absence of the adequate temptation in the circumstances of his life and calling. Time and the occasion count for much in the production of crime, as in the production of other human events; and it is quite possible that behind the crime of one who succumbs to an overwhelming temptation there may sometimes lie more merit than in the open virtue of another who has never been greatly tempted.