d to utter.

She answered quickly, and with great decision, that whatever might have
been his meaning at that hour, she felt sure he had finally repented; and
added with great earnestness, 'I do not believe that any child of the
heavenly Father is ever left to eternal sin.'

I said that such a hope was most delightful to my feelings, but that I
had always regarded the indulgence of it as a dangerous one.

Her look, voice, and manner, at that moment, are indelibly fixed in my
mind. She looked at me so sadly, so firmly, and said,--

'Danger, Mrs. Stowe! What danger can come from indulging that hope, like
the danger that comes from not having it?'

I said in my turn, 'What danger comes from not having it?'

'The danger of losing all faith in God,' she said, 'all hope for others,
all strength to try and save them. I once knew a lady,' she added, 'who
was in a state of scepticism and despair from belief in that doctrine. I
think I saved her by giving her my faith.'

I was silent; and she continued: 'Lord Byron believed in eternal
punishment fully: for though he reasoned against Christianity as it is
commonly received, he could not reason himself out of it; and I think it
made him desperate. He used to say, "The worst of it is I do believe."
Had he seen God as I see him, I am sure his heart would have relented.'

She went on to say, that his sins, great as they were, admitted of much
palliation and excuse; that he was the child of singular and ill-matched
parents; that he had an organisation originally fine, but one capable
equally of great good or great evil; that in his childhood he had only
the worst and most fatal influences; that he grew up into manhood with no
guide; that there was everything in the classical course of the schools
to develop an unhealthy growth of passion, and no moral influence of any
kind to restrain it; that the manners of his day were corrupt; that what
were now considered vices in society were then spoken of as matters of
course among young noblemen; that drinking, gaming, and licentiousness
everywhere abounded and that, up to a certain time, he was no worse than
multitudes of other young men of his day,--only that the vices of his day
were worse for him. The excesses of passion, the disregard of physical
laws in eating, drinking, and living, wrought effects on him that they
did not on less sensitively organised frames, and prepared him for the
evil hour when he fell into the sin which