sumption, the rage of unspeakable
fire. Our world and all the worlds of the system, are, I suppose, doomed
to fall back at length into their parent furnace. Then will come one end
and another beginning. There is many an end and many a beginning. At one
of those ends, and that not the furthest, must surely lie a hell, in
which, of all sins, the sin of cruelty, under whatever pretext
committed, will receive its meed from Him with whom there is no respect
of persons, but who giveth to every man according to his works. Nor will
it avail him to plead that in life he never believed in such
retribution; for a cruelty that would have been restrained by a fear of
hell was none the less hellworthy.

"But I will not follow this track. The general conviction of humanity
will be found right against any conclusions calling themselves
scientific, that go beyond the scope or the reach of science. Neither
will I presume to suggest the operation of any _lex talionis_ in respect
of cruelty. I know little concerning the salvation by fire of which St.
Paul writes in his first epistle to the Corinthians; but I say this,
that if the difficulty of curing cruelty be commensurate with the horror
of its nature, then verily for the cruel must the furnace of wrath be
seven times heated. Ah! for them, poor injured ones, the wrong passes
away! Friendly, lovely death, the midwife of Heaven, comes to their
relief, and their pain sinks in precious peace. But what is to be done
for our brother's soul, bespattered with the gore of innocence? Shall
the cries and moans of the torture he inflicted haunt him like an evil
smell? Shall the phantoms of exquisite and sickening pains float
lambent about the fingers, and pass and repass through the heart and
brain, that sent their realities quivering and burning into the souls of
the speechless ones? It has been said somewhere that the hell for the
cruel man would be to have the faces of all the creatures he had wronged
come staring round him, with sad, weary eyes. But must not the divine
nature, the pitiful heart of the universe, have already begun to
reassert itself in him, before that would hurt him? Upon such a man the
justice in my heart desires this retribution--to desire more would be to
be more vile than he; to desire less would not be to love my
brother:--that the soul capable of such deeds shall be compelled to know
the nature of its deeds in the light of the absolute Truth--that the
eternal fact shall fl