"But I will not follow this track. The general conviction of humanity will be found right against any conclusions calling themselves scientific, that go beyond the scope or the reach of science. Neither will I presume to suggest the operation of any _lex talionis_ in respect of cruelty. I know little concerning the salvation by fire of which St. Paul writes in his first epistle to the Corinthians; but I say this, that if the difficulty of curing cruelty be commensurate with the horror of its nature, then verily for the cruel must the furnace of wrath be seven times heated. Ah! for them, poor injured ones, the wrong passes away! Friendly, lovely death, the midwife of Heaven, comes to their relief, and their pain sinks in precious peace. But what is to be done for our brother's soul, bespattered with the gore of innocence? Shall the cries and moans of the torture he inflicted haunt him like an evil smell? Shall the phantoms of exquisite and sickening pains float lambent about the fingers, and pass and repass through the heart and brain, that sent their realities quivering and burning into the souls of the speechless ones? It has been said somewhere that the hell for the cruel man would be to have the faces of all the creatures he had wronged come staring round him, with sad, weary eyes. But must not the divine nature, the pitiful heart of the universe, have already begun to reassert itself in him, before that would hurt him? Upon such a man the justice in my heart desires this retribution--to desire more would be to be more vile than he; to desire less would not be to love my brother:--that the soul capable of such deeds shall be compelled to know the nature of its deeds in the light of the absolute Truth--that the eternal fact shall flame out from the divine region of its own conscience until it writhe in the shame of being itself, loathe as absolute horror the deeds which it would now justify, and long for deliverance from that which it has made of itself. The moment the discipline begins to blossom, the moment the man begins to thirst after confession and reparation, then is he once more my brother; then from an object of disgust in spite of pity, he becomes a being for all tender, honest hearts in the universe of God to love, cherish, revere. "Meantime, you who behold with aching hearts the wrongs done to the lower brethren that ought to be cherished as those to whom less has been given, having done all, stand comforted in the thought that not one of them suffers without the loving, caring, sustaining presence of the great Father of the universe, the Father of men, the God and Father of Jesus Christ, the God of the sparrows and the ravens and the oxen--yea, of the lilies of the field."