The fate of the heathen who are suffering, not from any personal rejection of true religion, but on account of the sins of some distant ancestors who forsook the worship of the true God, is a mysterious subject, and one on which true Christians have differed. The most that any of us can do is to take comfort in the conviction that-- "The love of God is broader Than the measure of man's mind." It must not, however, be thought, because Gordon held that the ignorance of the heathen was no bar to their salvation, that he in any way undervalued the benefits of the Christian faith. Again and again, in view of his being asked to become a Mohammedan in order to save his life, he says in substance what he wrote on September 10, 1884, when Khartoum was surrounded with bigoted Mahdists: "If the Christian faith is a myth, then let men throw it off; but it is mean and dishonourable to do so merely to save one's life, if one believes it is the true faith." He also believed that heathen magicians had influence with God. Writing to his sister shortly after a repulse that his men received from some natives near Moogie, in the Equatorial Province, he says: "Did I not mention the incantations made against us by the magicians on the other side, and how somehow, from the earnestness that they made them with, I had some thought of misgiving on account of them? These prayers were earnest prayers for celestial aid, in which the Pray-er knew he would need help from some unknown power to avert a danger. That the native knows not the true God is true; but God knows him, and moved him to pray, and answered his prayer." But while General Gordon held much in common with the liberal Evangelicals, there was one point on which he differed from them very strongly, and on which he was more in sympathy with the Broad Church party in the National Church, or those amongst the Nonconformists known as the Down Grade party; this was the doctrine known as Universalism. Whether we agree with him or not, we must in honesty recognise the fact that Gordon held a modified form of the doctrine that there is no such thing as future punishment. Writing on the 13th October 1878 he gives his views thus:-- "I look on universal salvation for every human being, past, present, or future, as certain, and, as I hope for my own, no doubt comes into my mind on this subject. Is it credible that so _many_ would wish it to be otherwise, and fight you about it? And among those _many_ are numbers, whose lives, weighed truly as to their merits by the scale of the sanctuary, would kick the beam _against_ those _they_ condemn. "Once I did believe that some perished altogether at the end of the world--were annihilated, as having no souls. After this, I believed that the world was made up of incarnated children of God and incarnated children of the evil spirit; and then I came to the belief that _the two are in one_.