Against all the texts which urged repentance before it was too late, Barnum placed the one psalm which twenty-six times declares, “His mercy endureth for ever.” His Universalism allowed wide latitude for work on earth, coupled with faith hereafter, and set no specific time limit, as Barnum expressed it, for repentance. There was no promised punishment for a Universalist who neglected the forms of repentance before his day of death. It was the only possible religion for a Barnum, and he was so grateful for its existence that besides remembering the church in his will and endowing a natural history museum at Tufts College, the Universalist college, he often argued strenuously and picturesquely in the effort to aid the dissemination of its doctrines. When he was seventy-three years old, he told a reporter for the _New York Sun_: “I believe in the ultimate holiness and happiness of all mankind. The idea of a sufficiency of repentance is revolting to common sense. Suppose a case: A pirate, who has killed in cold blood a hundred men, is caught, repents on the gallows, and says, ‘I am sorry for what I have done, and am going to Jesus.’ A certain proportion of those he has killed, say fifty per cent., having been cut off in their sins, without time for repentance, are supposed to be damned. Is it conceivable, as consistent with the justice of God, that the repentant pirate shall look over the battlements of heaven down upon those fifty whom he sent to hell, and complacently congratulate his redeemed soul upon his luck in having had time to repent before he was hanged? No: I can’t believe in that.... Now I don’t think that fear is the proper thing to incite people to do good. Putting punishment away off in a dim and indefinite future is not making much of a present influence. It reminds me of a chap who was caught by a deacon in the act of stealing a piece of silk. ‘Don’t you know that you will have to pay for that silk at the day of judgment?’ said the deacon. ‘I’d no idea you gave such a long credit, or I’d have taken two pieces,’ replied the thief. All sects do good in their way, but I prefer to have my children believe as I do--not as I was taught in my youth, however--in a God of love, instead of cruelty or vindictiveness, and that His chastisements are only parental and disciplinary.”