the end here.  But God does not change because we die, and wherever we go He is with us and gives us energy to do just what we choose to do.  It’s hell before we die when we live that way, and it’s hell after, for ages and ages and worlds and worlds perhaps, just until the hell-fire of sin has burned the wrong way of choosing out of us.  But remember, God never leaves us whatever we do; there’s nothing we feel that He doesn’t feel with us; we must all come in the end to being like Himself, and there’s always open the short simple way of choosing His help to do right, instead of the long, long way through hell.  But I tell you, Ann, whether you’re good or whether you’re wicked, God is in you and you are in Him.  If He left you, you would neither be good nor wicked, you would stop being; but He loves you in a bigger, closer way than you can think of loving anybody; and if you choose to go round the longest way you can, through the hell-fire of sin on earth and all the other worlds, He will suffer it all with you, and bring you in the end to be like Himself.”

The calm voice was sustained in physical strength by the strength of the new faith.

Ann’s reply followed on the track of thoughts that had occurred to her.  “Well now, there’s that awful low girl, Nelly Bowes.  She’s drunk all the time, and she’s got an awful disease.  She’s as bad as bad can be, and so is the man she lives with; and that little child of hers was born a hard-minded, sickly little beast.”  Her words had a touch of triumphant opposition as she brought them out slowly.  “It’s a mean, horrid shame for the child to be born like that.  It wasn’t its fault.  Do you mean to say God is with them?”

“It’s a long sight easier to believe that than that He just let them go to the devil!  I tell you it’s an awful wicked thing to teach people that God can save them and doesn’t.  God is saving those two and the child just by the hell they’ve brought on themselves and it; and He’s in hell with them, and He’ll bring them out to something grander than we can think about.  They could come to it without giving Him all that agony and themselves too; but if they won’t, He’ll go through it with them rather than turn them into puppets that He could pull by wires.  And as to the child, I can’t see it quite clear; but I see this much that I know is true:  it’s God’s character to have things so that a good man has a child with a nice clean soul, and it’s just by the same way of things that the other happens too.  It’s the working out of the bad man’s salvation to see his child worse than himself, and it’s the working out of the child’s salvation to have his bad soul in a bad body.  Look you, can’t you think that in the ages after death the saving of the soul of that child may be the one thing to make that man and woman divine?  They’ll never, never get rid of their child, and the child will come quicker to the light through the blackness he is born to than if, having the bad soul that he has, God was to set him in heaven.  But, look you, Ann, there isn’t a day or an hour that God is not asking them to choose the better and the quicker way, and there isn’t a day or an hour that He isn’t asking you and me and every one else in the world to do as He does so as to help them to choose it, and live out the sufferings of their life with them till they do.”