The proverb having thus had its rise from life, however it may be often impossible to trace that rise, will continually turn back to life again; it will attest its own practical character by the frequency with which it will present itself for use, and will have been actually used upon earnest and important occasions; throwing its weight into one scale or the other at some critical moment, and sometimes with decisive effect. I have little doubt that with knowledge sufficient one might bring together a large collection of instances wherein, at significant moments, the proverb has played its part, and, it may be, very often helped to bring about issues, of which all would acknowledge the importance. In this aspect, as having been used at a great critical moment, and as part of the moral influence brought to bear on that occasion for effecting a great result, no proverb of man’s can be compared with that one which the Lord used when He met his future Apostle, but at this time his persecutor, in the way, and warned him, of the fruitlessness and folly of a longer resistance to a might which must overcome him, and with still greater harm to himself, at the last: _It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks_.[34] (Acts xxvi. 14.) It is not always observed, but yet it adds much to the fitness of this proverb’s use on this great occasion, that it was already, even in that heathen world to which originally it belonged, predominantly used to note the madness of a striving on man’s part against the superior power of the gods; for so we find it in the chief passages of heathen antiquity in which it occurs.[35] I must take the second illustration of my assertion from a very different quarter, passing at a single stride from the kingdom of heaven to the kingdom of hell, and finding my example there. We are told then, that when Catherine de Medicis desired to overcome the hesitation of her son Charles the Ninth, and draw from him his consent to the massacre, afterwards known as that of St. Bartholomew, she urged on him with effect a proverb which she had brought with her from her own land, and assuredly one of the most convenient maxims for tyrants that was ever framed: _Sometimes clemency is cruelty, and cruelty clemency_.