Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century -- Fiction
Hawes. Oh, Jones! He shot his arrow up in the air and let it fall
wherever the wind chose to blow it, and then, if it came down on the
wrong man's head he'd say, never mind, my boy, accident!--pure accident!
No! give me a chap that hits out straight from the shoulder. Can't you
see this is worth a hundred Joneses beating about the bush and droning
us all asleep.
Fry. So he is, sir. So he is. But then I think he didn't ought to be
quite so personal. Fancy his requesting such a lot as ours to repent
their sins and go to heaven just to oblige him. There's a inducement! I
call that himper dig from the pulpit.
“What d'ye call it?” growled Hawes snappishly.
“Himper dig!” replied Fry stoutly.
In the afternoon Mr. Eden preached against cruelty.
“No crime is so thoroughly without excuse as this. Other crimes have
sometimes an adequate temptation, this never. The path to other crimes
is down-hill; to cruelty is up-hill. In the very act, Nature, who is on
the side of some crimes, cries out within us against this monstrous sin.
The blood of our victim flowing from our blows, its groans and sighs and
pallor, stay the uplifted arm and appeal to the furious heart. Wonderful
they should ever appeal in vain. Cruelty is not one of our pleasant
vices, and the opposite virtues are a garden of delights: 'Mercy is
twice blessed, it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.' God has
written His abhorrence of this monstrous sin in letters of fire and
blood on every page of history.”
Here he ransacked history, and gave them some thirty remarkable
instances of human cruelty, and of its being punished in kind so
strangely, and with such an exactness of retribution, that the finger of
God seemed visible writing on the world--“God hates cruelty.”
At the end of his examples he instanced two that happened under his own
eye--a favorite custom of this preacher.
“A man was tried in London for cruelty to animals; he was acquitted by a
legal flaw, though the evidence was clear against him. This man returned
homeward triumphant. The train in which he sat was drawn up by the side
of a station. An express-train passed on the up-line at full speed.
At the moment of passing the fly-wheel of the engine broke; a large
fragment was driven into the air and fell upon the stationary train. It
burst through one of the carriages and killed a man upon the spot.
That man was seated between two other men, neither of whom received
the slightest injury. The man so singled out was the cruel man who had
evaded man's justice, but could not escape His hand who created the
beasts as well as man, and who abhors all men who are cruel to any
creature He has formed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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