it
on the hone of their own hard hearts, and then go to work on men
sprawled out at full length under disaster, cutting mercilessly. They
begin by soft expressions of sympathy and pity and half praise, and,
lather the victim all over before they put on the sharp edge.

Let us be careful how we shoot at others lest we take down the wrong
one, remembering the servant of King William Rufus who shot at a deer,
but the arrow glanced against a tree and killed the king. Instead of
going out with shafts to pierce, and razors to cut, we had better
imitate the friend of Richard Coeur de Lion, who, in the war of the
Crusades, was captured and imprisoned, but none of his friends knew
where. So his loyal friend went around the land from stronghold to
stronghold, and sung at each window a snatch of song that Richard
Coeur de Lion had taught him in other days. And one day, coming before
a jail where he suspected his king might be incarcerated, he sung two
lines of song, and immediately King Richard responded from his cell
with the other two lines, and so his whereabouts were discovered, and
immediately a successful movement was made for his liberation. So let
us go up and down the world with the music of kind words and
sympathetic hearts, serenading the unfortunate, and trying to get out
of trouble men who had noble natures, but, by unforeseen
circumstances, have been incarcerated, thus liberating kings. More
hymn-book and less razor.

Especially ought we to be apologetic and merciful toward those who,
while they have great faults, have also great virtues. Some people are
barren of virtues. No weeds verily, but no flowers. I must not be too
much enraged at a nettle along the fence if it be in a field
containing forty acres of ripe Michigan wheat. At the present time,
naturalists tell us, there is on the sun a spot twenty thousand miles
long, but from the brightness and warmth I conclude it is a good deal
of a sun yet.

Again, when I read in my text that the Lord shaves with the hired
razor of Assyria the land of Judea, I bethink myself of the precision
of God's providence. A razor swung the tenth part of an inch out of
the right line means either failure or laceration, but God's dealings
never slip, and they do not miss by the thousandth part of an inch the
right direction. People talk as though things in this world were at
loose ends. Cholera sweeps across Marseilles and Madrid and Palermo,
and we watch anxiously. Will the epide