Still to remember wrongs.’ Shall God be less honourable and remember the wrong done against him, not by his equals, but by his own frail creatures! To be unable to trust God is to degrade him. Those passages in the New Testament which give the narratives most interest and dignity, are the parables in which a servant is told to forgive a debt to one who had forgiven him; in which a brother is to be forgiven until seventy times seven (that is unlimitedly); and the prayer where men claim forgiveness as they have themselves forgiven others their trespasses. What was this but erecting a high moral argument against the relentlessness of future punishment of erring man? If, therefore, man is to forgive, shall God do less? Shall man be more just than God? Is there anything so grand in the life of Christ as his forgiving his enemies, as he expired on the cross? Was it God the Sufferer behaving more nobly than will God the Judge? Was this the magnificent teaching of fraternity to vengeful man, or is it to be regarded but as a sublime libel on the hereafter judgments of heaven? The Infidel is Infidel to error, but he believes in truth and humanity, and when he believes in God, he will prefer to believe that which is noble of him. He will be able to trust him. Holding by no conscious error, doing no dishonour in thought and offering, his homage to love and truth, why should the unbeliever fear to die! Carlile saw not less clearly than this, nor felt less strongly, and he knew that only those fear death who have never thought about it at all, or thought about it wrongly. Carlile’s early career gave evidence of that iron hauteur which characterised him. In dedicating from Dorchester Gaol, his second volume of the _Republican_, to Sir Robert Gifford, the Attorney General of that day, (1820) he wrote, ‘Gratitude being one of the noblest traits in the character of animals, both rational and irrational, _to which ever you may deem me allied_, I feel that I owe it to you.’ Carlile taunted the Society for the Suppression of Vice, or as he most correctly styled it the Vice Society, saying that, ‘next to their secretary, Pritchard, the lawyer, he had gained most by their existence,(1) and had sold more Deistical volumes in one year through their exertions than he should in seven, in the ordinary course of business.’(2) Carlile’s cheerful disposition resisted the sombre influence of the dungeon, and he declared when Wedderbum arrived at Dorchester Gaol that he would ‘endeavour to get him chaplain, as the officiating one was so extremely fat that he could hardly get up to the pulpit, and when there, he was so long in recovering from the exertion, that he could not read the prayers with sufficient solemnity.(3) 1. Repub. vol. ii. p. 183. 2. Repub. vol. ii. p. 185. 3. Repub. vol. iii. p. 112.