being’s work here is finished, he is taken hence to be utilised elsewhere.  Everlasting progress is the law of our existence, whether here or elsewhere,—­no stopping, far less annihilation.  And then the character of our Maker is Love, this Love having satisfied Justice by self-sacrifice, and nothing is more reiterated in the Psalms than that “His mercy endureth for ever;” which cannot be true if bodies and spirits—­even of the wicked—­are to be condemned by Him to endless torment.  Adequate punishment, and that for the wretched creature’s own improvement, is only in accordance with the voice of reason, and the voice of inspired wisdom too; for though our Lord Christ warns against a fearful retribution (involved in the phrase of “the undying worm and the unquenchable fire,” as He was looking over the wall of Jerusalem into Tophet and the valley of Hinnom where the offal from the thousands of sacrifices was perpetually rotting and being burned, so taking his parable from an incident, as usual)—­He yet “went and preached after death to the spirits in prison,” probably to those who were then enduring some such purgatorial punishment.  After all, this sentence of King Solomon as to a fallen tree, so often misapplied, is not one of the higher forms of inspiration; even St. Paul qualifies his own sometimes; and there are several disputable texts in Proverbs:  and, if taken literally for exposition, we all must admit that the felling, of a tree is the immediate precursor to its further life of usefulness.  Let us, then, rationally hope that the dead in Christ will be improved from good to better and best; and that even those who have failed to live for Him in this world may by some purifying education in the next come finally to the happy far-off end of being saved by Him at last.

The words everlasting and forever are continually used in Scripture to indicate a long time,—­not necessarily an eternity (see Cruden for many proofs).  Moreover, if all hope of improvement ends with this life (a doctrine in which such extremes as Atheism and Calvinism strangely agree), what becomes of all the commonest forms of humanity, its intermediate failures, too bad for a heaven and too good for a hell; to say less of insane, idiotic, and other helpless creatures; and the millions of the untaught in Christendom, who never have had a chance, and billions of the Heathen brutalised through the ages by birth and evil custom?  Yes; for all there must be in the near hereafter continuous new chances of improvement and hopes of better life.

There is one poem in the volume superadded to my Dramatics which I will introduce here, as it is quite a tour de force in its way of double rhyming throughout, and has, moreover, excellent moral uses:  so I wish it read more widely.

    Behind the Veil.

    “Mysteries! crowding around us,
    How ye perplex and confound us,—­
    Each our ignorance screening
    Hidden in words without meaning!