Human Nature

It seems to me hardly possible that any one could be cruel to a dumb animal if he believed in the future existence of that creature after death. It is most likely that very few persons of those here present have ever thought of such a thing. The idea of it is now put before you, and I imagine that many would be at first disposed to deny the possibility, and many more the probability of it.

But it certainly is not impossible. On the contrary, it is probable, and there is good reason to believe that it is so. It was the opinion, among those of many others, of the great Bishop Butler one of the most profound thinkers that ever lived. He wrote: “We cannot argue from the reason of the thing, that death is the destruction of living agents.” “Neither can we find anything in the whole analogy of Nature to afford us even the slightest presumption that animals ever lose their living powers, much less, if it were possible, that they lose them by death.” He adds: “All difficulties to the contrary are so apparently, and wholly, founded in our ignorance, that it is wonderful they should be insisted on by any but such as are weak enough to think that they are acquainted with the whole system of things.” Long before his time it was the opinion of Tertullian; and Poole, in his “Synopsis Criticorum,” on the passage, says that it was so held by the Rabbins.

Thus also wrote the Rev. John Wesley: “They, too, are immortal. They themselves also shall be delivered.” “They will be restored with vast increase, being exalted and refined in a manner which we, ourselves, are not now able to comprehend.” “What if it should then please the All-wise, the All-Gracious Creator to raise them higher in the scale of beings?” “What if it should please Him, when He makes us ‘equal to the angels,’ to make them what we are now, creatures capable of God, capable of knowing, and loving, and enjoying, the author of their being?” “Ought our eye to be evil, because He is good?” “When God has ‘renewed the face of the earth,’ they shall enjoy happiness suited to their state, without alloy, without interruption, and without end.” “Their bodies, indeed, are ‘crushed before the moth’; but their souls will never die.” “Indeed, all spirits, we have reason to believe, are clothed with immortality, having no inward principle of corruption, and being liable to no external violence.” “What, then, is the barrier between man and brutes? the line which they cannot pass?” “It is not ‘reason.’ Set aside that ambiguous term; exchange it for the plain word ‘understanding,’ and who can deny that brutes have this? We may as well deny that they have sight and hearing.”

So, also, Doctor Adam Clarke, — after a long and elaborate argument, he ends, speaking of animals: “It is reasonable to conclude that as they cannot have the happiness designed for them in this state, they must have it in another.” [Thus, again, the Rev. S. Thompson: — “As Christ shall most certainly triumph over all His enemies, and as Death is one, then He shall restore life unto all which once enjoyed it.” “The last enemy that shall be destroyed, is Death.” Matthew Henry, in his commentary on Romans viii., writes, that the creatures will have “as great an advancement as the glory of the children of God will be to them.” “It should seem,” he says, “by the Scriptures, that there will be some kind of restoration of them.” Dr. Hitchcock, in his ” Religion of Geology,” points out that the passage in the Psalms, which says: “Man that is in honour and abideth not, is like the beasts that perish,” cannot mean that they will never live again, for that would be to say the same of men who are here said to be “like” them in this behalf. The great German theologian, Tholuck, is of the same opinion, as was also Martin Luther.]

“It is therefore of God” — I quote from the preface to a small book of my own “Records of Animal Sagacity,” which has been out of print for some years — “it is therefore of God, that there is something solemn in the death of every living creature. No one can watch without any emotion the eye glazing in death of a faithful dog; the mild look of a dying bird; or the expiring throb of a wounded animal! Who can avoid the thought that something is going away which he cannot bring back, nor any power of his then stay, even for a while, the departure of? And if it be some long-known and favourite companion, conspicuous, perhaps, for fidelity, affection, and sagacity, whose bodily life is ebbing away; who is there who can resist the thought that he is not parting with the dying creature for ever; but that the same Creator who gave the spirit, and now commands it to ‘return,’ will one day restore it, and bid it live again, or, rather, will never allow it really to die? It is repulsive to our natural feeling to think that anything in the nature of spiritual life can be annihilated.

The idea of the death of a body, and of its being doomed to destruction, is of itself sad and painful; the thought of the simultaneous destruction of the spirit, our own soul resists. We are forced, by a natural impulse, to ask whether the living spirit in any creature is not too much the breath of God, to cease to live, and to perish with the body? Whether it may not have been intended by the Almighty to live hereafter and for ever, restored to a renewed and ‘spiritual body,’ even as we look to be to our own? Whether it is not of too noble and excellent a nature to perish for ever, and may not, in the case of the irrational, but irresponsible and innocent part of the animal creation, be restored to a better and everlasting state.

The ways indeed of God ‘are not as our ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts,’ but on no other supposition can we, at present, see any compensation, as there then abundantly would be, — not that He, the Sovereign Creator, ‘of His own will,’ of all, is bound to make compensation — for the sufferings and deaths of the creatures, the necessary consequence of the fall of man, and too frequently aggravated unnecessarily by him.'”

It might be thought that a church, and especially such a church as York Minster, of which all Yorkshiremen are so justly proud, is not the place for anything to be said about dumb animals; that here we have only to do with men as having souls. But how do you know that animals have not souls? Most certainly you cannot prove that they have not. Nay, you will see from what I have said, that there is much to be believed the other way, and in favour of the thought that they have. “Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you that God should raise the dead,” in the case of the animal creation, any more than in that of man? God, “in whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind.”

And this brings me to the practical part of the question. I quoted, in the earlier part of this sermon, in the words of that great and good man, John Wesley: we “cannot deny that animals have understanding, not to say reason, that, if we did, it would be as well to deny that they have sight or hearing.”

It was fortunate for John Wesley that he lived and died before Darwin was born. He was saved from seeing the wretched effects of the shallow infidelity of which that man’s preposterous and idle vagaries have been the source. Well did The Times call his “book” a continuous conjugation of the potential mood: “may,” “can,” “might,” ” would,” “could,” ” should,” ” ought,” and then ” must.”

The ” Origin of Infidelity ” would have been the proper title of his book; as, then, in turn, Infidelity of Cruelty. I do not speak without warrant.

One of his arch-priests, Huxley, who was described in The Spectator, only last month, as living in “Dreamland,” delivered himself of the following sapient remarks on occasion of the meeting of the British Association at Belfast: “There is a good deal to be said for the hypothesis that animals are mere machines, as much so as if they were mills or steam-engines, and that they have no feeling; that they do not hear, see, or smell; and that their ‘apparent states of consciousness,’ as they seem to us, are only the results of a ‘mechanical reflex process.'” This is philosophy! This is science! This is the way those who dub themselves “deep thinkers” “deceive the hearts of the simple.”

Who can wonder, after this, at the atrocious, cold-blooded, and cowardly cruelties practised by the experimenters on living animals? I could fill you a small volume with the opinions of good men and true on these practices. I will take only some out of many before me. A “Hell” (Sir Arthur Helps). “Abominable and atrocious” (Lord Shaftesbury). “Cruelty in its worst form is the ultimate result of Science.” “Cruelty in the garb and pretences of Science.”

“Now Science has become the rival of the tortures of the Inquisition, and by increase of learning has learned to torment still more ingeniously.” “Ancient Paganism may well put us to shame.” “To cut up a living horse, day after day, in order to practise students in dissection, is a crime and abomination hardly less monstrous from his not having an immortal soul.”

“An inevitable logic would in a couple of generations unteach all tenderness towards human suffering (if such horrors are endured) and carry us back into greater heartlessness than that of the worst Barbarians.” “A new oppression.” “The Scientific Torquemadas of the day.” “The inseparable companion of the vilest impurities and vices to which flesh is heir.” — Saturday Review.

These are specimens merely, out of many which, as I said, I have before me, and any number more of the opinions of able men as to the practices in question. Now, then, a word or two as to the practices themselves.

They are performed every day and every night in the year, and that in thousands upon thousands of cases, not only on the Continent, but in England and America. You know what pain a slight scald on the hand gives you, or a slight burn, or a slight cut, and, much more, a severe one, of any of these. And then how gently and tenderly they are even touched by kind and sympathising friends, especially by female friends, and “mollified with ointment.”

Now, what is told us by these men themselves, for all which I have chapter and verse before me, as to the way they deal with pet animals, monkeys even — from which they tell us they are themselves descended — dogs, our loving companions; lambs; doves even, or any other birds; in fact, living creatures of any kind or sort, which they can buy, or have stolen for them, to practise their cowardly and detestable cruelties on?

This is the end of many a favourite lost dog in London and other places at Home or abroad. They are slowly baked to death. They are slowly boiled to death. They are slowly burned to death. They are slowly frozen to death. They are slowly starved to death. They are slowly suffocated to death. Their brains are slowly cut out. Their throats are used to pour boiling water into their bodies. Their throats are also cut away so that the animal cannot swallow. They are skinned alive, and then the nerves acted on by electricity. This has been done for ten hours at a time, to see how long their nerves would remain sensitive to pain! They are drugged with a drug which paralyses them from moving, or even, I believe, from crying out to show their suffering, but leaves them to endure it helplessly in its extremest and direst forms. Worst of all, they are often, thus and then, not only not released, if, indeed, there were any chance of their recovery, but not even killed, to be put out of their misery. That would be too much trouble. They are left just as they are, nailed down on the board, for hours or days, half, or more than half, thus cut to pieces, to die, after any length of time, and to suffer till then, in addition, the agonies of thirst, which every one knows is occasioned by nothing so much as by pain.

A Frenchman of the name of Claude Bernard was the inventor of a machine — an “infernal machine” I may call it — for slowly baking animals to death, in the way I have been speaking of, so as for their dying pains to be watched by the lookers on. He died, and “went to his own place,” only the other day. And this was the man whom Huxley and his fellow-experimenters delighted to honour; set up an image to worship him, and completed his degradation and their own by bepraising his memory. But “the memory of the wicked shall rot,” Almost his last words were: “Our hands are empty.”

Huxley follows Darwin, and, therefore, claims to be descended from “a hairy animal with long pointed ears.” He either believes what he says or he does not. If he does, he is, on his own showing, an animal, and as such can have “no feeling.” Let him offer himself, then, on the shrine of science, to be experimented on ad libitum. We shall very soon see and hear whether, as an animal, he has feeling or not.

Sir William Ferguson has expressed himself as “very doubtful” whether all the experiments have done any special good to surgery. Professor Rolleston has shown that the effects of drugs on animals cannot be relied on as to their effects on men. Even Dr. Rutherford is forced to admit that at the best they would prove nothing. Sir Thomas Watson said that they “might be only misleading.” Mr. Lawson Tait, of Birmingham, one of the most eminent surgeons of the day, has lately published an able pamphlet to prove the “uselessness” of these practices.

We are often told that it is only on the Continent these most execrable cruelties are perpetrated. That is a fraud on the public. Sir William Gull says that the English experimenters would not wish to be thought more humane than their foreign brethren!

The favourite animals for “use,” as the term is, are cats, because they are more tenacious of life. A Dr. Legg thus “used” sixteen of them on one occasion, at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Some of them lived for eight or ten days. On one of them which had been “useless ” for this purpose another experiment was tried. One did not die until the twenty-third day. Dr. Legg was too pious to put them to death on the Sunday, so he left them just as they were. A dog was first kept without food for eighteen hours, was then cut up for half an hour, and then experimented on for eight hours more.

A dog is tortured with ever-increasing torture to see how long his love for his master, who tortures him, would last. A female dog is thus tortured to see whether her affection for her young can be overcome or not. Another and her young one both tortured together for the like object.

As to Darwin and his book, from which Huxley takes his inspiration for these practices, you would hardly believe it, but I took the trouble to go all through it to see how many times such words as “probably,” “it is likely,” “I believe,” “perhaps,” and such like, occur in it, and you will find that there are no fewer than just seven hundred in this one octavo volume! And this is your “deep thinker”! This is the book that has been belauded and bepraised usque ad nauseam, by our “philosophers” and “professors,” as if built upon the most elaborate argumentation, and perfectly unanswerable! This is the book that has been the will-o’-the-wisp that has led away the weak-minded into the Slough of Despond of a shallow and contemptible Infidelity.

Happily, his book is fast going out of date. It is given up, we are told, as inconclusive, by St. George Mivart, Wallace, Lubbock, Geikie, Gaudry, Herbert Spencer, and even Huxley himself, as well as, also, most of the French men of science: Agassiz, Hall, Dana, and, head of all, Barraude, have rejected it, as proving nothing of what it claims to prove. [As to so-called Evolution, here is what Clerk-Maxwell showed us before his lamented death. “In the heavens we discover by their light (that of molecules), and by their light alone, stars so distant from one another that no natural thing can ever have passed from one to another, and yet this light, which is the sole evidence of the existence of these distant worlds, tells us also that each of them is built up of molecules of the same kinds as those which we find on earth. No theory of Evolution can be found to allow for the similarity of molecules, for Evolution necessarily implies continuous changes, and the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction. None of the processes of Nature, since the time when Nature began, have produced the slightest difference in the proportions of any molecule. We are, therefore, unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules or the identity of their properties to any of the causes which we call natural.

On the other hand, the same quality of each molecule to all others of the same kind, ‘gives it,’ as Sir John Herschel has well said, ‘the essential character of a manufactured article’ and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent.”] Only this day fortnight, the new Bishop of Manchester, Dr. Moorhouse, thus spoke in his eloquent sermon at St. Michael’s, Paddington: “I venture to say this, that those who have patience and the culture to read and understand books like Loetz’s ‘Metaphysics,’ and Green’s ‘Prolegomena in Ethics,’ are aware that the knell of the Materialistic philosophy ” — of which Darwinism has been the mainstay —” has been rung in Europe. I do not expect it, and all the suppositions that came out of it, to disappear in a day from newspapers and reviews; for a popular philosophy does not die at once because it is discredited; but not the less, I affirm its doom is pronounced, and sealed.”

Yes! Magna est Veritas, et prtxvalebit! And well may we, as Believers, proclaim it; for, as The Lancet said only last month, “A Scientist is of course an Agnostic.” Darwin’s book begins with a falsehood on the face of it — on the very title page. It professes to give an account of the “Origin of Species.” It does nothing of the sort It does not even attempt it; it begins with what Darwin calls a monad — the creature and the name alike of his own creating. But he does not say what was the origin of his “Origin”!

However, another of the wise men does. No less a person than the President of the British Association, Sir William Thomson, at the meeting at Edinburgh in 1871. This is what he tells us — I give it in words of my own — he tells us that a bit of moss, adhering, unsinged, and unscathed, to a red-hot thunderbolt, shattered off from some wrecked world in the illimitable and unknown realms of space, fell on this earth, millions upon millions, or billions upon billions of years ago, and became the “promise and potency,” in the words of another of them, of every single species of the whole of the animal and vegetable kingdoms; of body, soul, and spirit. He does not tell us what was the “Origin” of his bit of moss. He only puts the difficulty a step farther back.

This is just one instance and example of what these very wise men, who are much too “deep thinkers” to believe in the sacred Scripture, ask you to accept at their bidding. And remember, as I have shown you, that it is on such idle theories, such vain imaginations, that those take their stand, who would justify their cruelties on living animals. [Here, in York, you had, only in 1881, some specimens of the fond dreams of these Darwinian Freethinkers, from no less a person than the then President of the British Association, Sir John Lubbock, at its fiftieth anniversary. I quote them to show you that these men, who, one and all, go in for experiments on living animals, ought to be themselves inoculated with a little common sense before they set up for teachers of others, and to be wise above “that which is written.”

But, no! The stereotyped text of their “Lay Sermons” always is: “No doubt we are the people, and wisdom shall die with us.” Not a boy in your national schools but could have taught Sir John Lubbock better. Here, I say, are two or three specimens of what he told you the other day in York: — One would have thought the “force of folly could no further go” than it should have been gravely propounded to us by a President of the British Association, at the annual meeting four or five years since, that he and his friends — none but they — can “see at a glance” that the tiger is striped with reference to the jungle it lives in. He has not told us what conceivable connection there can be between the two, nor why, if it be an advantage, Natural Selection has not given the like striping to all the other animals that live in the jungle.

Next, “We,” — that is, he and his friends, and they only — “can see at a glance” that the lion is “sandy like the desert.” I suppose our grandfathers and grandmothers and every old woman knew that when they were children; but here again the President has left us in the dark as to what on earth the statement is to tell us beyond what we already were so well acquainted with.

Moreover, as a matter of fact, the lion does not live in the sandy desert, but in the dense jungle, amid an infinity of colours of the brightest and darkest hues; and when he comes out, “roaring after his prey,” into the open desert of sand — if it be sand — for it may just as often be of clay or any other earth — it is at night, when the colour of neither can have any effect whatever, one way or another.

Let Sir John Lubbock go to the grand old Bible, which I, as a naturalist, am not ashamed of, if he is, and he may learn the A B C of this matter. “Thou makest darkness that it may be night, wherein all the beasts of the forest do move. The lions roaring after their prey do seek their meat from God. The sun ariseth, and they get them away together, and lay them down in their dens.” Nay, even in the other case, if the similarity of colour could be supposed, as I can only conclude the President intended us to imagine, to be of use to the royal beast in stealing on his prey, unobserved, his roar would have given them ample notice of his approach long beforehand.

Again, thirdly, we are told that the “markings of the leopard resemble spots of sunshine gleaming through the leaves.” Well, if they did — though they do not — there positively is not the most distant resemblance between the two, so that the one could be mistaken for the other —what use would it be to the leopard if there were such resemblance? Sir John Lubbock did not enlighten us on this point. Why, the leopard, too, sleeps in its lair while the sun is shining, and prowls about in the dusk of night to seek its prey; its own roar, in its way, making itself heard by every animal within hearing of it

And these idle dreams are told us with the utmost gravity by the President of the British Association on its fiftieth anniversary at York, in proof of the superior insight of the Darwinian clique, and as establishing for ever, by such wonderful discoveries, the scientific value of the flimsy fancies and vain vagaries of their ” craze.”]

I shall not have time to-night to do more than just allude to some few of only too many other forms of cruelty to animals; but they are all as nothing in comparison with this. They arise, in great part, from want of thought more than from any intention of being cruel. I will only, then, add a very few words about such in conclusion. And let me urge upon you all to set your faces against cruelty to God’s dumb creatures in any shape or way.

Never be ashamed of doing an act of kindness to man or beast. I will give you a good example to follow in this behalf, even that of the great Duke of Wellington. A gentleman who is a great collector of autographs has a very singular one of the Duke of Wellington, which he prizes very highly, as he considers it characteristic of a noble-hearted man, The following is a faithful transcript:

Strathfieldsaye, July 27, 1837.

Field-Marshal the Duke of Wellington is happy to inform William Harris that his toad is alive and well.

An explanation of this singular letter is given in these words: — The Duke of Wellington was one day taking his usual country walk, when he heard a cry of distress. He walked to the spot, and found a chubby, rosy-faced boy lying on the ground and bending his head over a tame toad, and crying as if his little heart would break. “What’s the matter, my lad?” said the Duke. “Oh, sir, please, sir, my poor toad! I bring it something to eat every morning. But they are going to send me off ever so far away to school; nobody will bring it anything to eat when I am gone, and I am afraid it will die.” “Nevermind; don’t cry, lad. I’ll see that the toad is well fed, and you shall hear all about it when you are at school.”

The boy thanked the gentleman heartily, dried up his tears, and went home. During the time he was at school he received five letters from his Grace similar to that given above; and when he returned for his Christmas holidays the toad was, as the Duke said, “alive and well,” but, in accordance with the usual habits of these animals, he was in his winter’s sleep, in which he remained until spring and genial weather brought him from his well-guarded hole in the ground.

There are only too many opportunities in which you may do acts of kindness to God’s dumb creatures, and that also every day of your lives. The very fact that they are dumb ought, surely, to speak to us even more, if I may say so, than if they could tell us their woes and their wrongs. So, if you ask me: “What shall we do then?” You can fancy a poor dog or horse saying to you: “Give me a little water to drink, for I am thirsty.” Many a time you can thus relieve them. I do think that their mute language, if it be only imagined, will go home to the heart, and be eloquent in the way it speaks to it.

It has been thought by a most learned expositor that it was thus that Balaam’s ass spoke to him. In fact, the idea, it seems to me, is in some degree borne out by the Apostle still calling the animal “the dumb ass,” though thus speaking to his master; and this as if with a man’s voice.

But I give it merely as his thought. I can put before you another good example to follow, in an anecdote which appeared only last month in The Manchester Evening News. It was taken from an Australian paper, and speaking of the new Bishop of Manchester, Dr. Moorhouse: “On a very hot Sunday he noticed a number of cattle collected round a water-trough. He hurried out, went towards the trough, and found it empty. There was a large pump beside the trough; but the people of the district apparently wanted Providence to send them rain so as to save themselves the trouble of pumping up water for their cattle. The Bishop read them a practical lesson. He climbed up the ladder leading to the pump, and worked away vigorously at the handle until the trough was full and the thirsty cattle had water enough to drink.”

The paper adds: “It is gratifying to know that this practical lesson was not lost upon the inhabitants of the district, to whom it was given.” You may be asked if you do not think foxhunting a manly and noble pursuit? You can say that you see nothing manly or noble in fifty men, with fifty horses and fifty dogs, pursuing a frightened little animal of some three feet long, which runs away in terror for its life at the first sound. And all at an enormous waste of time and money and great risk of life. If asked the same question as to hare-hunting, you can speak even still more strongly, for the proper name of the little animal is Lepus timidus. It is of so remarkably timid a character as for that to have given it its Latin name.

I need say nothing of stag-hunting, which seems to have nobody’s good word, as to there being anything manly in it, but only the utter contrary. It ever and always reminds me of the verse in the old version of the Psalms,

As pants the hart for cooling streams,

When heated in the chase.

Is there anything manly or noble in shooting at tame pigeons a few yards off, and they even maimed beforehand, to make them the easier to be hit? — often only shot at and wounded, and just able to get away to die miserably? Gambling, too, at the root of the whole thing; and this its fruit. Then there is battue shooting. There is nothing deliberately cruel in this, and I leave the shooters to the jeers of the peasantry behind their backs.

See from the brake the whirring pheasant springs,

To mount exulting on triumphant wings;

Ah ! what avail his glossy varying dyes,

His purple crest and crimson-circled eyes;

The vivid green his shining plumes unfold;

His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold.

A wretched shambles receives a waggon load of the blood-bedabbled and quivering remains that bring to a close the day’s ignoble and paltry proceedings. You can beg a boy or man to set some poor bird at liberty which he has just caught, or even has had some time, if not born and bred in captivity. What is more wretched than to see a skylark beating against the bars of its cage, in the vain attempt to soar away to sing in the vault of heaven, where it longs and pines to be! Or a poor thrush, scarcely able to turn round in its prison, and moping itself to death in some dingy street! I often think of the starling in the cage, as told of in Sterne’s “Sentimental Journey,” with its melancholy “I can’t get out! I can’t get out!” Let me repeat to you as well as I can — I wish I could do it better — some very beautiful lines by one of our best olden English poets, Richard Crashaw, who lived between two and three hundred years ago: —

Ah me! what is this? Alas, and alas,

A sweet bird flutters upon the grass;

Flutters and struggles with quivering wing,

Tempted and snar’d — gentle, guileless thing:

Vain, vain thy struggles; for, lo, a hand

Hollow’d above makes thee captive stand.

Home hies the captor, loud singing his joy,

He has got a pet song-bird for his boy.

Now twining and twisting a cage he makes,

Wire wrought and fasten’d. Ah! my heart aches!

It is a prison, for the poor bird prepar’d,

Shut close and netted, netted and barr’d.

Comes the flutter and gleam of forest leaves,

Through the trellis’d window under the eaves;

Comes the breath and stir of the vernal wind;

Comes the goldening sunshine — to remind

Of all that is lost: comes now and again

A far-off voice from the blading grain;

Calling, still calling, the songster to come

Back — once more back — to its woodland home.

I mark eyelids rise; mark the lifting wing:

Mark the swelling throat, as if it would sing;

Mark the weary “chirp, chirp,” like an infant’s cry,

Yearning after the free and boundless sky;

And the grand old woods, once more to sit

On the swinging bough into blossom smit.

Vain, vain, poor bird! thou’rt captive still;

Thou must bend thee to thy captor’s will:

Thy wing is cut; from thy mate thou’rt taken;

All alone thou abidest, sad, forsaken.

Once more: I will only detain you a very little longer. You can tell a driver to drive you slowly, and not as fast as he can, and give him an extra fee for the one rather than the other. You can make it a rule to give your horse, or your horses, their rest on the one day in seven, which the Commandment of God has ordained for them as well as for man: and never to take them out for your own pleasure only on the Holy Day. You can feed the birds with the crumbs which fall from your table when

Over the wold the wind blows cold.

When the hoar frost is chill upon mountain and rill,

and their

Trembling steps have borne them to your door,

to ask to be fed and kept from starving of cold and hunger. But, alas! there are many, too many, more forms of cruelty to even mention or touch upon. I must leave them and come to an end. You know whose are the words I take now for a text at the end of this sermon, or, discourse, rather; as in the fifth chapter of the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew, and the seventh verse: “Blessed are the merciful!”

They are the words of the All-Merciful Himself, even God our Saviour; and I can only add: “Hear Him!”

[The parts of this Sermon enclosed in brackets were omitted from it as preached.]