provides some way of satisfying His justice, they have no hope."

The fate of the heathen who are suffering, not from any personal
rejection of true religion, but on account of the sins of some distant
ancestors who forsook the worship of the true God, is a mysterious
subject, and one on which true Christians have differed. The most that
any of us can do is to take comfort in the conviction that--

"The love of God is broader
Than the measure of man's mind."

It must not, however, be thought, because Gordon held that the
ignorance of the heathen was no bar to their salvation, that he in any
way undervalued the benefits of the Christian faith. Again and again,
in view of his being asked to become a Mohammedan in order to save his
life, he says in substance what he wrote on September 10, 1884, when
Khartoum was surrounded with bigoted Mahdists: "If the Christian faith
is a myth, then let men throw it off; but it is mean and dishonourable
to do so merely to save one's life, if one believes it is the true
faith."

He also believed that heathen magicians had influence with God. Writing
to his sister shortly after a repulse that his men received from some
natives near Moogie, in the Equatorial Province, he says: "Did I not
mention the incantations made against us by the magicians on the other
side, and how somehow, from the earnestness that they made them with, I
had some thought of misgiving on account of them? These prayers were
earnest prayers for celestial aid, in which the Pray-er knew he would
need help from some unknown power to avert a danger. That the native
knows not the true God is true; but God knows him, and moved him to
pray, and answered his prayer."

But while General Gordon held much in common with the liberal
Evangelicals, there was one point on which he differed from them very
strongly, and on which he was more in sympathy with the Broad Church
party in the National Church, or those amongst the Nonconformists known
as the Down Grade party; this was the doctrine known as Universalism.
Whether we agree with him or not, we must in honesty recognise the fact
that Gordon held a modified form of the doctrine that there is no such
thing as future punishment. Writing on the 13th October 1878 he gives
his views thus:--

"I look on universal salvation for every human being, past,
present, or future, as certain, and, as I hope for my own, no doubt
comes into my mind on this subject. Is it c