us, all that
the greatest saints have ever had to make them full of love and sacred
fear.

Now, then, let me make one or two reflections by way of stirring up
your hearts and making you mourn over Christ's sufferings, as you are
called to do at this season.

1. First, as to these sufferings you will observe that our Lord is
called a lamb in the text; that is, He was as defenceless, and as
innocent, as a lamb is. Since then Scripture compares Him to this
inoffensive and unprotected animal, we may without presumption or
irreverence take the image as a means of conveying to our minds those
feelings which our Lord's sufferings should excite in us. I mean,
consider how very horrible it is to read the accounts which sometimes
meet us of cruelties exercised on brute animals. Does it not sometimes
make us shudder to hear tell of them, or to read them in some chance
publication which we take up? At one time it is the wanton deed of
barbarous and angry owners who ill-treat their cattle, or beasts of
burden; and at another, it is the cold-blooded and calculating act of
men of science, who make experiments on brute animals, perhaps merely
from a sort of curiosity. I do not like to go into particulars, for
many reasons; but one of those instances which we read of as happening
in this day, and which seems more shocking than the rest, is, when the
poor dumb victim is fastened against a wall, pierced, gashed, and so
left to linger out its life. Now do you not see that I have a reason
for saying this, and am not using these distressing words for nothing?
For what was this but the very cruelty inflicted upon our Lord? He was
gashed with the scourge, pierced through hands and feet, and so
fastened to the Cross, and there left, and that as a spectacle. Now
what is it moves our very hearts, and sickens us so much at cruelty
shown to poor brutes? I suppose this first, that they have done no
harm; next, that they have no power whatever of resistance; it is the
cowardice and tyranny of which they are the victims which makes their
sufferings so especially touching. For instance, if they were
dangerous animals, take the case of wild beasts at large, able not only
to defend themselves, but even to attack us; much as we might dislike
to hear of their wounds and agony, yet our feelings would be of a very
different kind; but there is something so very dreadful, so satanic in
tormenting those who never have harmed us, and who cannot defen