lth, and
crime found there.

Only one, a young man, a minister who had been expelled from the
church in the city where he had preached, found his way to the prison.
He went out one Sunday afternoon, and asked permission to preach to
the convicts. It was freely granted. Such wild heresy! Such odd,
eccentric ideas! Such flights of oratory! Such fiery brands tossed
into the old tabernacles of religious belief! Such blows upon the old
batteries of narrowness and impossibility! They had never heard
anything like it. Had he preached thus anywhere else he would have
been promptly silenced. But a lot of convicts was not an audience
likely to be injured by the too free circulating of the doctrine he
advocated. What if he should convince them that eternal punishment was
a myth, and an insult flung in the face of the Creator? A slur upon
His justice, and a lie to His divine goodness? What if he snapped his
finger at a lake of brimstone and of eternal fire? And his wild
ravings about an inconsistent Being, accepted as the head of all
wisdom, and tenderness,--and mercy, and at the same time as the
perfection of all cruelty and injustice, in that He creates only to
destroy,--what if the seed scattered should take root? What if those
old sin-blackened souls should comfort themselves with the new
doctrine, the idea that no good can be lost? God cannot be God and
destroy any good thing. It is wicked, it is devilish to kill that
which is good. God cannot be wicked and be the good God, the kind
All-Father, at the same time. Nor has He created any so vile as to be
without some one virtue. In the dust of the evil He has not failed to
drop one grain of gold to glisten, and to make glad the dull waste of
life. The grain is there, planted by God's hand, in _every_ soul. It
was in _their_ souls, poor, old, sin-covered, forsaken souls, toiling
up to the light through those begrimed walls among the filth, and
dust, and mould. Not one of them but was God's work, and bore His
grain of gold. None would be lost, not one. What matter if the prison
registrar's table of deaths did record so many, Found dead! Drowned!
Killed! Shot! Blank! Blank! Blank! Meaning they disappeared, nobody
knows how or when.

It was a strange, sweet hope to them, that came in that wild sermon of
a bishop-silenced young heretic. They thought about it a good deal,
and began, some of them whose terms were to expire with life, to dig
down into the rust and mire with the spade