"It's a long sight easier to believe that than that He just let them go
to the devil! I tell you it's an awful wicked thing to teach people
that God can save them and doesn't. God is saving those two and the
child just by the hell they've brought on themselves and it; and He's in
hell with them, and He'll bring them out to something grander than we
can think about. They could come to it without giving Him all that agony
and themselves too; but if they won't, He'll go through it with them
rather than turn them into puppets that He could pull by wires. And as
to the child, I can't see it quite clear; but I see this much that I
know is true: it's God's character to have things so that a good man has
a child with a nice clean soul, and it's just by the same way of things
that the other happens too. It's the working out of the bad man's
salvation to see his child worse than himself, and it's the working out
of the child's salvation to have his bad soul in a bad body. Look you,
can't you think that in the ages after death the saving of the soul of
that child may be the one thing to make that man and woman divine?
They'll never, never get rid of their child, and the child will come
quicker to the light through the blackness he is born to than if, having
the bad soul that he has, God was to set him in heaven. But, look you,
Ann, there isn't a day or an hour that God is not asking them to choose
the better and the quicker way, and there isn't a day or an hour that He
isn't asking you and me and every one else in the world to do as He does
so as to help them to choose it, and live out the sufferings of their
life with them till they do."

Ann sat quite still; she had a feeling that if she moved to make any
other sound, however slight, than that of speech some spell would be
broken. In the darkness Bart had awakened out of the stupor of his
injury; and although Ann could not have expressed it, she felt that his