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218 pain remains, no hatred remains, no sin remains, because no opposition to God remains. But no real soul remains. The moral being is dead and done with, only an intellectual being remains."

"And what becomes of them?"

"They become the beasts of burden of the universe: they become instruments for carrying on the various mechanisms of the visible creation. They become subject to us just as your horse is to you. Many such are under my own direction and control."

Here Jack started and almost interrupted him, then hesitated and said, "I beg your pardon."

"Say on," replied Leäfar, quite softly and kindly.

"What I was going to say," said Jack, "was this: It seems to me that the final doom of which you tell us must have come to some of them before this."

"Some of them are meeting it every day," said he. "The mightiest of them can hold out for periods of secular vastness without losing their power of will in any appreciable degree; others, again, lose it all after a period comparable with the life of a man."

"And do they all know that they must lose it?"

"As well as you know that you must die."

"Ah!" said Jack, "I thought so, and now, sir,