and show one at least something of its agony.  He was afflicted by the sins of the whole world.  They hurt him, tore him, wounded him, and broke his heart.  He did not merely know that people suffer from starvation; that children run to hide under a bed at the first sound of a drunken parent’s step on the stair; that thousands of women are friendless and defaced on the streets; that thousands of boys go to their bodily and spiritual ruin only for want of a little natural parental care; that men and women are locked up like wild beasts in prison who would be good parents and law-abiding citizens were love allowed to enter and plead with them—­he did not merely know these things, but he visualised and felt in his own person the actual tortures of all these perishing creatures.  He wept for them.  He prayed for them.  Sometimes he would not sleep for thinking of them.

“I have seen him with suffering face and extended arms walk up and down his room, crying out from the depths of his heart:  ’Oh, those poor people, those poor people!—­the sad, wretched women, the little, trembling frightened children meant to be so happy!—­all cursed with sin, cursed and crushed and tortured by sin!’ And he would then open his arms as if to embrace the whole world, and exclaim, ’Why won’t they let us save them?’—­meaning, ’Why won’t society and the State let The Salvation Army save them?’

“His attitude towards suffering and sorrow was, nevertheless, harder in many ways than that of certain humanitarians.  He believed in a Devil, he believed in Hell, and he believed in the saying that there are those who would not be persuaded though one rose from the dead.  And so he held it the wisdom of statesmanship that when all men have been given a fair opportunity for repentance, and after love has done everything in its power to save and convert the lawless and bad, those who will not accept Salvation should be punished with all the force of a civilisation that must needs defend itself.  The word punishment was very often on his lips.  I think that he believed in the value of punishment almost as profoundly as he believed in the value of love.  He believed that love could save the very worst man and the very worst woman in the world who wanted to be saved; and he also believed that nothing was so just and wise as rigorous punishment for the unrighteous who would not be saved.  I think that he would have set up in England, if he had enjoyed the power which we give to politicians, two classes of prison—­the reforming prison, controlled only by compassionate Christians who believe in love; and the punishing prison, which isolates the evil and iniquitous from contact with innocence and struggling virtue.  In that direction this most merciful man was merciless.