"Again, to how many a lonely woman is not life made endurable, even pleasant, by the possession and the love of a devoted dog! The man who would focus the burning glass of science upon the animal, may well mock at such a mission, and speak words contemptuous of the yellow old maid with her yellow ribbons and her yellow dog. Nor would it change his countenance or soften his heart to be assured that that withered husk of womanhood was lovely once, and the heart in it is loving still; that she was reduced to all but misery by the self-indulgence of a brother, to whom the desolation of a sister was but a pebble to pave the way to his pleasures; that there is no one left her now to love, or to be grateful for her love, but the creature which he regards merely as a box of nature's secrets, worthy only of being rudely ransacked for what it may contain, and thrown aside when shattered in the search. A box he is indeed, in which lies inclosed a shining secret!--a truth too radiant for the eyes of such a man as he; the love of a living God is in him and his fellows, ranging the world in broken incarnation, ministering to forlorn humanity in dumb yet divine service. Who knows, in their great silence, how germane with ours may not be their share in the groanings that can not be uttered! "Friends, there must be a hell. If we leave scripture and human belief aside, science reveals to us that nature has her catastrophes--that there is just so much of the failed cycle, of the unrecovered, the unbalanced, the incompleted, the fallen-short, in her motions, that the result must be collision, shattering resumption, the rage of unspeakable fire. Our world and all the worlds of the system, are, I suppose, doomed to fall back at length into their parent furnace. Then will come one end and another beginning. There is many an end and many a beginning. At one of those ends, and that not the furthest, must surely lie a hell, in which, of all sins, the sin of cruelty, under whatever pretext committed, will receive its meed from Him with whom there is no respect of persons, but who giveth to every man according to his works. Nor will it avail him to plead that in life he never believed in such retribution; for a cruelty that would have been restrained by a fear of hell was none the less hellworthy.