f these sentiments
brings paroxysms in every man's life when _some_ idea of God is seized
upon, no matter of what value, no matter how soon relinquished, how
evanescent. Eternity is long enough for the progress of those that we
see lowest in our moral scale. You know I believe in the progress of the
human race, as I do in its immortality; and the barbarous conception of
the Divinity of the least advanced of that race confirms me in this
faith as much as the purest Christianity of its foremost nations and
individuals. Revelation, you say, alone gives any image of God to you;
but which Revelation? When did God begin, or when has He ceased, to
reveal Himself to man? And is it in the Christian Revelation that you
find your doctrine of partial immortality and partial annihilation? I
believe I told you once of my having read in America a pamphlet
suggesting that sin eventually _put out_, destroyed, annihilated, and
did away with, those souls of which it took possession; this is
something like your present position, and I do not know when I received
so painful an impression as from reading that pamphlet, or a profound
distress that lasted so long, from a mere abstract proposition addressed
to my imagination.

I believe all God's creatures have known Him, in such proportion as He
and _they_ have chosen; _i.e._, to none hath He left Himself utterly
without witness; to some that witness has been the perfect life and
doctrine of Jesus Christ, the most complete revelation of God that the
world has known.

All have known Him, by His great grace, in some mode and measure; and
therefore I believe all are immortal: none have known Him as He is, and
but few in any age of the world have known Him as they might; and an
eternity of progress holds forth, to my mind, the only hope large enough
to compensate for the difference of advantages here, and to atone for
the inadequate use of those advantages.

Dearest Harriet, I hate not to make an effort to answer you, and you
like, above all things, this species of questioning, speculating, and
discussing. But there is something to me almost irreverent in thus
catching up these everlasting themes, as it were, in the breathing-time
between my theatrical rehearsals and performances. You will not mistake
me. I know that the soul may be about its work (does not George Herbert
say

"Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws,
Makes that and the action fine"?)

even at such times, but a deep and