These tendencies, so plainly exhibited here, reasoning from experience, we infer are to continue after death, until the final result must be the entire exclusion of the evil from the good, whenever power exists to compel the separation. This power, all must feel is held and will be exercised by the Author of all minds, whose great plan, so far as reason teaches, can be carried to perfection only by such a consummation. One point in the history of our race has a mournful pertinence to this question. We find that the improvement and the safety of the great commonwealth is always, more or less, promoted by the ruin of individuals. Multitudes are deterred from evil courses by the miserable end of those who pursue them; so that the good are often preserved by the destruction of the bad. So, too, we find exhibitions of the fact that minds are utterly ruined, and ruined _for ever_, so far as we can perceive. The man who has stultified his intellect, ruined his health, seared his conscience, and blunted all his generous and benevolent sensibilities by a course of debauchery, cruelty and crime, is a wreck as total and irretrievable, so far as we can see, as a watch whose springs and pivots are crushed beneath the hammer, or a human body whose every lineament is effaced beneath the rushing locomotive train. The common language of life expresses such mental facts in precisely the same terms as are applied to physical catastrophes. Thus, a man who is given up to debauchery, intemperance and crime, is said to be a “total wreck”—“entirely destroyed,”—“utterly ruined.” Add to this the teaching of experience, that when men are bad, the increase of blessings only increases indulgence and crime. At the same time punishment does not tend to reformation. The more men suffer for their folly and guilt, the more hardened they become. The victims of licentiousness and intemperance, though they suffer such miseries, have ever been regarded as the farthest removed from the probabilities of reformation. Add to all this, the deductions of reason as to the moral nature of the Creator and Governor of all minds. He has power to separate the good and bad; his great design, of which we here see only the _tendencies_, makes it indispensable to the perfect happiness of the good that they be separated from the bad—a _perfectly_ happy commonwealth can not be attained where the bad form a part—while the _sense of justice_ exists in God on a scale far above ours, demanding _added_ penalties for the known and willful destruction of happiness. He, like his children on earth, feels that craving for retributive justice, which can never rest till the guilty and remorseless monster receives the just recompense for his cruelty and crimes.