“Yes,” he said, “for you would recognise the fact that man, being man, is free, and that once his freedom absolutely ceases he is no longer man. The Infinite One may, if He so please, take away his freedom, but by so doing He annihilates the man.” “You raise a hard question,” said I; “is the Infinite One, then, committed to the eternal prevalence of evil? Is He pledged never to annihilate the power to do evil?” Leäfar answered very slowly and solemnly, and yet there was a smile upon his countenance as he spoke. “There is one thing impossible to the Eternal Love, and that is to annihilate Himself: and it would be to annihilate Himself if He were to permit the existence of Eternal hatred.” “Then,” said I, “if I understand you rightly, these beings are doomed to annihilation?” He smiled again and said, “Surely the freedom which opposes and continues to oppose God must perish: it is self-doomed; that is as certain as that the Love of God is infinite. The creature who so misuses his freedom must lose it at last, and then he is as if he had never possessed it. And so his moral being is, as you say, annihilated. All his other powers remain, but his will is dead. He becomes, like the brute, or like the earliest of the ethereal creation; nothing but an instrument in the hand of God. Such is the eternal doom of those who choose evil and abide by their choice. No pain remains, no hatred remains, no sin remains, because no opposition to God remains. But no real soul remains. The moral being is dead and done with, only an intellectual being remains.” “And what becomes of them?” “They become the beasts of burden of the universe: they become instruments for carrying on the various mechanisms of the visible creation. They become subject to us just as your horse is to you. Many such are under my own direction and control.” Here Jack started and almost interrupted him, then hesitated and said, “I beg your pardon.” “Say on,” replied Leäfar, quite softly and kindly. “What I was going to say,” said Jack, “was this: It seems to me that the final doom of which you tell us must have come to some of them before this.” “Some of them are meeting it every day,” said he. “The mightiest of them can hold out for periods of secular vastness without losing their power of will in any appreciable degree; others, again, lose it all after a period comparable with the life of a man.” “And do they all know that they must lose it?” “As well as you know that you must die.” “Ah!” said Jack, “I thought so, and now, sir, tell me one thing more: if this doom comes upon them while they are in human form, what happens then?” “They pass back at once into their own world and are dealt with as I have told you there.”