“Whenever good rose up it was rejected, scorned, despised and mocked till it grew old, and then respectability being born with age it was received and converted into evil. Good men died, egged on by screeching multitudes to death, themselves egged on by devils of inferior order, who had chosen evil rather than good. And there the farce and tragedy were again repeated. They rewarded evil with the effects of evil—as they said—bringing about all that torture and disrupture of the spirit, which, like the undying worm the Saviour spoke of, must writhe and twine until its appointed day. Moreover, this suffering and this great curse are due to us, they say. For had we been content to let man live his length of days without knowledge of good or evil, he would never have known pain, and passed away in happiness like summer mist. “At last we made an agreement at another conference, and it was this. “We had known that as years rolled by and the empty cells became capable of being filled they had on death descended to hell, there to be emptied or built into hideous shape according to their fulness. Now we demanded that each soul not completely given up to evil (or almost so) might, when emptied, return again to earth, for on some our light had shone, and it meant that this last ray went to swell the enemy’s spoils and weakened us, since it was giving up part of our being. They agreed to this, and then the after suffering began. Hell, previously, had been but the dark shadow, except to those trained to its menial service, who had wilfully steeped themselves in sin and shame. “It was a bold, it may seem a cruel stroke, as it had taken us long to fathom this little riddle of growing evolution. Heaven is often depicted as a land of endless hallelujahs, but some of us have no taste that way. It needs an absorbing genius of wisdom (which is simplicity) even to understand it. And presently, after these years of failure and disappointment, another little step to success was reached. In hell they give devil’s medicine and devil’s punishment. And it is an excellent cure of its kind. They never punish lightly. If a thing is worth punishing they punish, if not they let it pass, to the winds, perhaps, if it is no use. And so those souls which had to be reclaimed, redeemed if you like it better, suffered their punishment and then returned for the second time to earth. But the cloud of mystery again surrounded them. They remembered, yet remembered not. They were, and are, those more sensitive and higher natures for which the world can often not account. They have had a forgotten experience, whose effects in part remain.