We must notice also that God, who is said to love righteousness, can never crush out righteousness in any-human soul. There is no one so utterly degraded as to be without one sign of good. Among the lowest and vilest of our population, we find beautiful instances of kindly feeling and generous help. Can any woman be more degraded than she who only values her womanhood as a means of gain, who drinks, fights, and steals? Let those who have been among such women say if they have not been cheered sometimes by a very ray of the light of God, when the most. degraded has shown kindness to an equally degraded sister, and when the very gains of sin have been purified by being; poured into the lap of a suffering and dying companion. Shall love and devotion, however feeble, unselfishness and sympathy, however transitory in their action, shall these stars of heaven be quenched in the blackness of the pit of hell? If it be so, then, verily, God is not the "righteous. Lord who loveth righteousness." But we cannot leave out of our impeachment of hell that it injures man, as much as it degrades his conceptions of God. It cultivates selfishness and fear, two of his basest passions. There has scarcely perhaps been born into the world this century a purer and more loving soul than that of the late John Keble, the author of the "Christian Year." Yet what a terrible effect this belief had on him; he must cling to his belief in hell, because otherwise he would have no certainty of heaven: "But where is then the stay of contrite hearts? Of old they leaned on Thy eternal word; But with the sinner's fear their hope departs, Fast linked as Thy great name to Thee, O Lord; That Name by which Thy faithful hope is past, That we should endless be, for joy or woe;-- And if the treasures of Thy wrath could waste, Thy lovers must their promised heaven forego."