negation of every good influence in childhood are not to be held accountable for the monsters' growth, I cannot now argue. But one thing is certain from the very statement of the case: a man who has ever once truly loved anybody is no such creature. The poor self-condemned soul whom Mr. Greg images as turning away in an agony of shame and hopelessness from the virtuous friend he loved on earth, and loves still at an immeasurable distance, such a soul is not outside the pale of love, divine or human. Nay, is he not, even assuming his guilt to be black as night, only in a similar relation to the purest of created souls, which that purest soul holds to the All-holy One above? If God can love us, is it not the acme of moral presumption to think of a human soul being too pure to love any sinner, so long as in him there remains any vestige of affection? The whole problem is unreal and impossible. In the first place, there is a potential moral equality between all souls capable of equal love, and the one can never reach a height whence it may justly despise the other. And in the second place, the higher the virtuous soul may have risen in the spiritual world, the more it must have acquired the godlike Insight which beholds the good under the evil, and not less the godlike Love which embraces the repentant Prodigal.*

It is with sincere pleasure that I add, on the re-publication of this paper, the following generous admission and candid revision of his judgment which Mr. Greg has appended to the last (7th)

But if such a dream of future separation for loving souls be wholly baseless, what can we imagine of the

edition of his Enigmas of Life. After quoting some observations of the Rev. J. Hamilton Thom and the above, he says:

"The force of these objections to my delineation cannot be gainsaid, and ought not to have been overlooked. No doubt, a soul that can so love and so feel its separation from the objects of its love, cannot be wholly lost. It must still retain elements of recovery and redemption, and qualities to win and to merit answering affection. The lovingness of a nature—its capacity for strong and deep attachment-must constitute, there as here, the most hopeful characteristic out of which to elicit and foster all other good. No doubt, again, if the sinful continue to love in spite of their sinfulness, the blessed will not cease to love in consequence of their blessedness. If so, it is natural, and indeed inevitable, to infer that a chief portion of their occupation in the spiritual world will consist in comforting the misery, and assisting in the restoration of the lost whom they have loved. We shall pursue this work with all the aid which our augmented powers on the one side, and their purged perceptions on the other, will combine to gather round the task,-and in the success and completion of that task, and in that alone, must lie the consummation of the bliss of Heaven.

"But this is not the only, nor perhaps the most irresistible inference forced upon us by the above considerations. If so vast an ingredient in the misery of the condemned consist in the severance from those they love, this same severance must forın a terrible drawback from the felicity of the redeemed. How, indeed, can they enjoy anything to be called happiness hereafter, if the bad—their bad, not strangers, but their dearest intimates, those who have shared their inmost confidences, and made up the intensest interests of their earthly life—are groaning and writhing in hopeless anguish close at hand? (for everything will be close to us in that scene where darkness and distance are no more). Obviously only in one way,—by ceasing to love: that is, by renouncing, or losing, or crushing the best and purest part of their nature, by

real relation which may subsist hereafter between souls attached in faithful friendship, but of which one is of far higher moral standing than the other? It is a very hard thing to conceive how the guilt of a beloved soul would

abjuring the most specific teaching of Christ, by turning away from the worship and imitation of that God who Is Love. Or, to put it in still terser and bolder language, How, given a Hell of torment and despair for millions of our friends and fellow-men, can the good enjoy Heaven except by becoming bad? without becoming transformed, miraculously changed, and changed deplorably for the worse? without, in a word, putting on, along with the white garments of the Redeemed, a coldness and hardness of heart, a stony, supercilious egotism, which on earth would have justly forfeited all claim to regard, endurance, or esteem? Our affections are probably the best things about us—the attributes through which we most approach and resemble the Divine nature; yet, assuming the Hell of Theologians, those affections must be foregone or trampled down in Heaven, or else Heaven will itself become a Hell. As a condition, or a consequence, of being admitted to the presence of God, we should have to forswear the little that is Godlike in our composition. Do not these simple reflections suffice to disperse into thin air the current notions of a world of everlasting pain?

"One further corollary may be briefly indicated. Hell, if there be such a place or state, though a scene of merited and awful suffering, must be full of the mighty mitigations which Hope always brings, and can scarcely be devoid of an element of sweetness which might almost seem like joy, if the consciousness be permitted and ever present to its denizens, that 'elsewhere' Guardian Angels-parents who have entered into glory,' wives who cluster round the Throne, sisters and friends who have 'emerged from the ruins of the tomb, and the deeper ruins of the Fall''—are for ever at work, with untiring faithfulness and the sure instincts of a perfected intelligence, for the purification of the stained, the strengthening of the weak, the softening of the fierce and hard, and the final rescue of them all."-Postscriptum, p. 311.

look from the regions of celestial purity; but I think something may be done to help ourselves if we endeavour to fix our attention steadily on what would probably hold an analogous position in our eyes, namely, the sins of our own long past years. Passing over the mere faults of childhood, many of us can unhappily remember committing very serious errors at a period of youth when we had attained to full responsibility. Looking back to one of these sins, say after twenty or forty years, how does it strike us? We do not, I apprehend, feel much of the indignation against ourselves which in a certain measure warps our judgment of offences still recent, the disgust of sloughs into which even now we do not feel safe but that our foot again may slip. We can think of the old faults, long lived over or conquered, calmly as of the faults of another person. But it is of another whose inmost mind and all whose antecedents are intimately known to us. Very commonly we feel that we deserved the heaviest punishment for our misdeeds, that what did befal us of evil was perfectly merited, and that much heavier chastisement would not have exceeded our deserts. Yet we never feel that we were deserving of reprobation, of being finally abandoned by God or man. We say to ourselves, "I was odious at that age. How heartless, self-engrossed, false, sensual, ungenerous I was! Truly there was hardly a spark of good in me, and I wonder my friends bore me any affection." But even while we thus condemn ourselves, there is a latent comprehension of how it all came about; how we had

slipped into this fault, or been led into that one; found ourselves entangled by a preceding act and driven into the third; and how, all through, there was, at bottom, the possibility of becoming better, the seed of somewhat which God's kind Hand has since planted in a happier soil. Probably few of us turn from such memories save with the thanksgiving of the Psalmist to Him who has taken our feet out of the net, out of the mire and clay, and set them on a rock and ordered our goings. But while we bless God for His mercy to our sinfulness, that mercy only seems to us the natural act of a Divine Creator who penetrates all the depths of His creature's soul, and, with a compassion all-forgiving because allknowing, pities and helps our helplessness. The creeds which have taught men that God first gives over His children to a reprobate mind and then consigns them to a world of reprobation, find nothing to countenance them in the experience of the heart. They teach, strictly speaking, an unnatural God. The natural Father-God is a very different Person. Now, in a certain faint and far-off way, we can imagine (not presumptuously, I think) the sympathy of God for the struggling soul to be like that which we should feel for a beloved child whose faults we understood better than any earthly parent, and even better than we understand the faults of our own youth. There is no abatement needful of the full measure of condemnation for the sin. There is only the reservation (never forgotten in our own case) that the sinner was something else besides a sinner, that