“Oh, there is hope in His mercy for ever—­
      Yea, for the worst, after ages of woe,
    Till on this side of the uttermost Never,
      Even the devils His mercy may know! 
    Punished and purified, Justice and Reason
      Well would rejoice if the Judge on His throne
    Grant His salvation to all in full season,
      Ruling, in bliss, all His works as His own.

    VII.

    “Every creature, redeemed and recovered
      Through the One sacrifice offered for all,
    Where sin and death so fatally hovered,
      Mercy triumphant in full o’er the fall! 
    Thus shall old memories harmonise sweetly
      With the grand heavenly anthem above,
    As this sad life that was shattered so fleetly,
      Then is made whole in the Infinite Love.”

It may count as one of my heresies in an orthodox theological sense, but I certainly cling to the great idea of Eternal Hope; and, after any amount of retributive punishment for purifying the “lost” soul, I look for ultimate salvation to all God’s creatures.  This short and partial trial-scene of ours is not enough to make an end with:  we begin here and progress for ever elsewhere.  Evil must die out, and good must survive alone for ever.

CHAPTER XXII.

PROTESTANT BALLADS.

Among my many fly-leaves, scattered by thousands from time to time in handbills or in newspapers all over the world, those in which I have praised Protestantism and denounced the dishonesty of our ecclesiastic traitors have earned me the highest meed both of glory and shame from partisan opponents.  Ever since in my boyhood, under the ministerial teaching of my rector, the celebrated Hugh M’Neile, at Albury for many years, I closed with the Evangelical religion of the good old Low Church type, I have by my life and writings excited against me the theological hatred of High Church, and Broad Church, and No Church, and especially of the Romanizers amongst our Established clergy.  Sundry religious newspapers and other periodicals, whose names I will not blazon by recording, have systematically attacked and slandered me from early manhood to this hour, and have diligently kept up my notoriety or fame (it was stupid enough of them from their point of view) by quips and cranks, as well as by more serious onslaughts, about which I am very pachydermatous, albeit there are pasted down in my archive-books all the paragraphs that have reached me.  But, even as in hydraulics, the harder you screw the greater the force, so with my combative nature, the more I am attacked the more obstinately I resist.  Hence the multitude and variety of my polemical lucubrations,—­mostly of a fragmentary character as Sibylline leaves:  some, however, appear in my “Ballads and Poems” (among them a famous “Down with foreign priestcraft,” circulated by thousands in the Midlands by an unknown