183. The point to which both Natural and Divine Selection would permit us to advance in severity towards this profane class, to which the enduring "Ecce Homo," or manifestation of any properly human sentiment or person, must always be instinctively abominable, seems to be conclusively indicated by the order following on the parable of the Talents,--"Those mine enemies, bring hither, and slay them before me." Nor does it seem reasonable, on the other hand, to set the limits of favouritism more narrowly. For even if, among fallible mortals, there may frequently be ground for the hesitation of just men to award the punishment of death to their enemies, the most beautiful story, to my present knowledge, of all antiquity, that of Cleobis and Bito, might suggest to them the fitness on some occasions, of distributing without any hesitation the reward of death to their friends. For surely the logical conclusion of the Bishop of Peterborough, respecting the treatment due to old women who have nothing supernatural about them, holds with still greater force when applied to the case of old women who have everything supernatural about them; and while it might remain questionable to some of us whether we had any right to deprive an invalid who had no soul, of what might still remain to her of even painful earthly existence; it would surely on the most religious grounds be both our privilege and our duty at once to dismiss any troublesome sufferer who _had_ a soul, to the distant and inoffensive felicities of heaven. 184. But I believe my hearers will approve me in again declining to disturb the serene confidence of daily action by these speculations in extreme; the really useful conclusion which, it seems to me, cannot be evaded, is that, without going so far as the exile of the inconveniently wicked, and translation of the inconveniently sick, to their proper spiritual mansions, we should at least be certain that we do not waste care in protracting disease which might have been spent in preserving health; that we do not appease in the splendour of our turreted hospitals the feelings of compassion which, rightly directed, might have prevented the need of them; nor pride ourselves on the peculiar form of Christian benevolence which leaves the cottage roofless to model the prison, and spends itself with zealous preference where, in the keen words of Carlyle, if you desire the material on which maximum expenditure of means and effort will produce the minimum result, "here you accurately have it."