‘What is the voice of Nature? Is it love? I see a wild battling of forces, ruthless, inexplicable, working out good--such good as exists--by agonies of evil. I see the strong trampling on the weak, life issuing from suffering and death, pain inflicted every day upon the innocent and unoffending; everywhere violence, cruelty, pestilence, cataclysm the laws of the universe. No, the voice of Nature is not love. ‘What is the voice of History? Is that then love? Has the progress of man been effected by beneficent agencies? Are the hands of civilisation stained with no bloodshed? Everywhere the pages of human history exhibit the red fires of tyranny, injustice, persecution, conscience sacrificed at the stake, virtue outraged and expelled, vice enthroned in the palace, nay, in the sanctuary of God, armies of men slaughtered for a tyrant’s will, butcheries, fusillades, dragonnades, noyades, the axe, the scaffold, the guillotine. Everywhere, everywhere. ‘Why should the Almighty, if He be All-Merciful, permit this carnage? There is no answer.’ The revolt of souls against religion is more often moral than intellectual in its origin. It is when the moral sense is shocked that the intellect sharpens its sword in the cause of unbelief. The growing humanity of life--a humanity which is the one clear compensating gain for many defaults--rises in protest against the severities of religious history or religious doctrine. The murderous deeds wrought by the heroes and heroines of the Old Testament did not offend the Covenanters as they offend their late descendants to-day. It would not seem that the teaching of Christ, in regard to the future life and its punishments and rewards, aroused so much as one faint murmur of indignation among His contemporaries, who were the vigilant jealous enemies of His Messiahship. Yet that teaching, interpreted with the literalness which would wring the last latent drop of bitterness out of metaphor or allegory, has come to be so keenly resented by sensitive consciences as to imperil the claim of His religion to be the divinely appointed satisfaction for the spiritual needs of humanity. Gerald was led on--it is but a step--from doubting the justice of God in this world to doubting it in the next. His spirit revolted at the inequalities and disproportions of the present life. But it revolted still more at the thought of an immutable inequality between the destinies of men in the unseen life. His father had always assumed this inequality as an element of revelation. He had spoken of the ‘great gulf fixed,’ of the eternity of bliss, and the eternity of condemnation. It was as sure to him as the Incarnation itself; nay, he would argue, if there was an Incarnation of the Eternal, can the penalty of rejecting Him be less than eternal?