"With reference to the doctrine of annihilation, I do not think it gives the same idea of God as is obtained from this other view. It may show force to annihilate, but we should think more highly of a monarch who would, by his wisdom, kindness, and long-suffering, turn a rebel people into faithful subjects, than of him who had the land wasted and utterly destroyed his rebellious subjects. I do not think that after the declaration, 'It is _finished_,' there can be any more probation; punishment brings no one to God." Once more, writing on the 16th May 1883, he says:-- "I have become much more timid about speaking of these matters of universal salvation, yet perforce one comes to this question. If every one lives, then he must live by the fact of his possession of an emanation of the Life of Life, which must be good, and never can be evil. This emanation is the cause of his existence, his life in fact, and that I regard as the '_he_.'" Perhaps the best answer will be found in Sir William Butler's "Life of Gordon." Dealing with Gordon's difficulty about future punishment, he says with truth:-- "Yet never lived there man who in his own life had seen more of the vast sum of human wrong-doing which has to be righted somewhere, and on which no sword of justice ever lights in this world. He does not seem to have asked himself the question, If I am shooting and hanging these maker of orphans; if I am punishing with stripes and chains these sellers and buyers of human flesh, and doing it in the name of truth and right, is the Great Judge of all to be denied His right to use the sword of justice upon those who are beyond my reach? Are nine-tenths of the evil-doers on earth not only to escape the penalty of their crimes, but often and often to be favoured reapers in the harvest of the world's success? You catch the common robber, or the man who steals, perhaps through starvation, penury, or through knowing no better, and you imprison him for years or for life; and is the rich usurer who has wrung the widow's farthing from her, is the fraudulent bankrupt, is the unjust judge, is the cruel spoiler of war to pass from a world that in millions and millions of cases gave them wealth and honours, and stars and garters, instead of ropes and bars and gallows, to go forthwith to free pardon, to everlasting light and endless rest beyond the grave? It would indeed be strange justice that meted to Jude and Judas the same measure of mercy in the final judgment."