“All this takes place with the knowledge and under the oversight of God. It is an indication of His ineffable wisdom that the diversities of natures for which created beings are themselves responsible are wrought together into the harmony of the world.[451] It is an indication not only of His wisdom but of His goodness that, while no creature is coerced into acting rightly, yet when it lapses it meets with evils and punishments. All punishments are remedial. God calls what are termed evils into existence to convert and purify those whom reason and admonition fail to change. He is thus the great Physician of souls.[452] The process of cure, acting as it does simply through free-will, takes in some cases an almost illimitable time. For God is long-suffering, and to some souls, as to some bodies, a rapid cure is not beneficial. But in the end all souls will be thoroughly purged.[453] All that any reasonable soul, cleansed of the dregs of all vices, and with every cloud of wickedness completely wiped away, can either feel or understand or think, will be wholly God: it will no longer either see or contain anything else but God: God will be the mode and measure of its every movement: and so God will be ‘all.’ Nor will there be any longer any distinction between good and evil, because evil will nowhere exist; for God is all things, and in Him no evil inheres. So, then, when the end has been brought back to the beginning, that state of things will be restored which the rational creation had when it had no need to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; all sense of wickedness will have been taken away; He who alone is the one good God becomes to the soul ‘all,’ and that not in some souls but ‘in all.’ There will be no longer death, nor the sting of death, nor any evil anywhere, but God will be ‘all in all.’”[454]