the way to his pleasures; that there is no one left her now to love, or to be grateful for her love, but the creature which he regards merely as a box of nature’s secrets, worthy only of being rudely ransacked for what it may contain, and thrown aside when shattered in the search.  A box he is indeed, in which lies inclosed a shining secret!—­a truth too radiant for the eyes of such a man as he; the love of a living God is in him and his fellows, ranging the world in broken incarnation, ministering to forlorn humanity in dumb yet divine service.  Who knows, in their great silence, how germane with ours may not be their share in the groanings that can not be uttered!

“Friends, there must be a hell.  If we leave scripture and human belief aside, science reveals to us that nature has her catastrophes—­that there is just so much of the failed cycle, of the unrecovered, the unbalanced, the incompleted, the fallen-short, in her motions, that the result must be collision, shattering resumption, 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.