n
quality."[220]

_Annihilation._--"The conversation took a serious turn. They spoke of
the horror that we all feel for annihilation.

"'Ah,' cried Father Hoop, 'be good enough to leave me out, if you
please. I have been too uncomfortable the first time to have any wish to
come back. If they would give me an immortality of bliss for a single
day of purgatory, I would not take it. The best that can befall us is to
cease to be.'

"This set me musing, and it seemed to me that so long as I was in good
health I should agree with Father Hoop; but that, at the last instant, I
should perhaps purchase the happiness of living again by a thousand,
nay, ten thousand, years of hell. Ah, my dear, if I thought that I
should see you again, I should soon persuade myself of what a daughter
once succeeded in persuading her father on his deathbed. He was an old
usurer; a priest had sworn to him that he would be damned unless he made
restitution. He resolved to comply, and calling his daughter to his
bedside, said to her: 'My child, you thought I should leave you very
rich, and so I should; but the man there insists that I shall burn in
hell-fire for ever, if I die without making restitution.' 'You are
talking nonsense, father, with your restitution and your damnation,' the
daughter answered; 'with your character I you will not have been damned
ten years, before you will be perfectly used to it.'

"This struck him as true, and he died without making restitution.

"And so behold us launched into a discussion on life and death, on the
world and its alleged Creator.

"Some one remarked that whether there be a God or no, it is impossible
to introduce that device either into nature or into a discussion without
darkening it.

"Another said that if a single supposition explained all the phenomena,
it would not follow from this that it is true; for who knows whether the
general order only allows of one reason? What, then, must we think of a
supposition which, so far from resolving the one difficulty for the sake
of which people imagined it, only makes an infinity of others spring up
from it?

"I believe, my dear, that our chat by the fireside still amuses you; so
I go on.

"Among these difficulties is one that has been proposed ever since the
world has been a world; 'tis that men suffer without having deserved
suffering. There has been no answer to it yet. 'Tis the incompatibility
of physical and moral evil with the nature of the Eterna