as it were on the spiritual retina, that a life of such
rejections of the light tends to make one incapable of receiving the
light for ever.

If this be so it is not at all fair to misrepresent it by saying that
God cruelly stereotypes a man's soul at death and will refuse him
permission to repent after death however much he may want to. The
voice of the Holy Ghost within tells us that this could never be true
of the Father. We must believe that through all Eternity, if the worst
sinner felt touched by the love of God and wanted to turn to Him, that
man would be saved. What we dread is that the man may not want to do
so, may have rendered himself incapable of doing so. We dread not
God's will, but the man's own will.

Character tends to permanence. Free will is a glorious but a dangerous
prerogative. All experience leads towards the belief that a human will
may so distort itself as to grow incapable of good. Even a character
not hardened into permanent evil may grow incapable of the highest
good. A soul even forgiven through the mercy of God may "enter into
life halt and maimed" like a consumptive patient cured of his disease
but going through life with only one lung.

Though the Bible does not give an absolutely definite pronouncement on
this question, yet the general trend of its teaching leads to the
belief that this life is our probation time. It everywhere calls for
immediate repentance. And St. Paul says that the Judgment is for deeds
"done _in the body_," and there are such hints as "the door was shut"
and "there is a sin unto death," and "it were better for a man not to
have known the way of righteousness than after he has known it to turn
from it."[1] And this has been the general belief of the Church in all
ages. Even in all the hopeful words of the ancient Fathers about
Christ preaching to the spirits in prison who in the dark old world
days "had sometime been disobedient," we have seen that they add some
such significant phrase as "that He might convert those _who were
capable_ of turning to Him." (See Chapter IV, p. 60.) And human
experience of character tending to permanence makes this fact of human
probation awfully probable. There is nothing in Scripture nor in its
interpretation by the Church, nor in human experience, to conflict with
the statement that in this life Acts make habits and Habits make
Character and character makes Destiny.

What new discoveries of God's power and merc