So these men speak, rightly or wrongly.  And for good or for evil, they will be heard.

And with these questions others have arisen, not new at all—­say these men—­but to be found, amid many contradictions, in the writings of all the best divines, when they have given up for a moment systems and theories, and listened to the voice of their own hearts; questions natural enough to an age which abhors cruelty, has abolished torture, labours for the reformation of criminals, and debates—­rightly or wrongly—­about abolishing capital punishment.  Men are asking questions about the heaven—­the spiritual world—­and saying—­“The spiritual world?  Is it only another material world which happens to be invisible now, but which may become visible hereafter:  or is it not rather the moral world—­the world of right and wrong?  Heaven?  Is not the true and real heaven the kingdom of love, justice, purity, beneficence?  Is not that the eternal heaven wherein God abides for ever, and with Him those who are like God?  And hell?  Is it not rather the anarchy of hate, injustice, impurity, uselessness; wherein abides all that is opposed to God?”

And with those thoughts come others about moral retribution—­“What is its purpose?  Can it—­can any punishment have any right purpose save the correction, or the annihilation, of the criminal?  Can God, in this respect, be at once less merciful and less powerful than man?  Is He so controlled by necessity that He is forced to bring into the world beings whom He knows to be incorrigible, and doomed to endless misery?  And if not so controlled, is not the alternative as to His character even more fearful?  He bids us copy His justice, His love.  Is that His justice, that His love, which if we copied, we should call each other, and deservedly, utterly unjust and unloving?  Can there be one morality for God, and another for man, made in the image of God?  Are these dark dogmas worthy of a Father who hateth nothing that He hath made, and is perfect in this—­that He makes His sun shine on the evil and on the good, and His rain fall on the just and on the unjust, and is good to the unthankful and to the evil?  Are they worthy of a Son who, in the fire of His divine charity, stooped from heaven to earth, to toil, to suffer, to die on the Cross, that the world by Him might be saved?  Are they worthy of that Spirit which proceeds from the Father and the Son, even that Spirit of boundless charity, and fervent love, by which the Son offered Himself to the Father, a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world—­and surely not in vain?”

So men are asking—­rightly or wrongly; and they are guarding themselves, at the same time, from the imputation of disbelief in moral retribution; of fancying God to be a careless, epicurean deity, cruelly indulgent to sin, and therefore, in so far, immoral.