pe to the wife that she took occasion to
remind her husband of his spiritual condition. 'Oh yes, sir,' she
replied, 'many and many a time have I woke him up o' nights, and
cried, "John, John, you little know the torments as is preparing
for you."' But the good woman, it seems, was not disturbed by any
such dire imaginings upon her own account.

Higher in the social scale, the apprehension of a Gehenna, or at
all events of such a one as our forefathers almost universally
believed in, is rapidly dying out. The mathematician tells us that
even as a question of numbers, 'about one in ten, my good sir, by
the most favourable computations,' the thing is incredible; the
philanthropist inquires indignantly, 'Is the city Arab then, who
grows to be thief and felon as naturally as a tree puts forth its
leaves, to be damned in both worlds?' and I notice that even the
clergy who come my way, and take their weak glass of negus while
the coach changes horses, no longer insist upon the point, but, at
the worst, 'faintly trust the larger hope.'

Notwithstanding these comparatively cheerful views upon a subject
so important to all passengers on life's highway, the general
feeling is, as I have said, one of profound dissatisfaction; the
good old notion that whatever is is right, is fast disappearing;
and in its place there is a doubt--rarely expressed except among
the philosophers, with whom, as I have said, I have nothing to
do--a secret, harassing, and unwelcome doubt respecting the divine
government of the world. It is a question which the very
philosophers are not likely to settle even among themselves, but it
has become very obtrusive and important. Men raise their eyebrows
and shrug their shoulders when it is alluded to, instead, as of
old, of pulverising the audacious questioner on the spot, or even
(as would have happened at a later date) putting him into Coventry;
they have no opinion to offer upon the subject, or at all events do
not wish to talk about it. But it is no longer, be it observed,
'bad form' in a general way to do so; it is only that the topic is
personally distasteful.

The once famous advocate of analogy threw a bitter seed among
mankind when he suggested, in all innocence, and merely for the
sake of his own argument, that as the innocent suffered for the
guilty in this world, so it might be in the world to come; and it
is bearing bitte