His discourse was of the children of Bethlehem slain by Herod, and he spoke of the dreadful sound of a bell and a trumpet heard suddenly in the midnight hour, when all were fast bound and lying defenceless in the fetters of sleep. He described the dreadful knocking at the doors--the bursting in of men with drawn swords--how babies were harled by the arms from their mothers' beds and bosoms, and dashed to death upon the marble floors. He told of parents that stood in the porches of their houses and made themselves the doors that the slayers were obliged to hew in pieces before they could enter in. He pictured the women flying along the street, in the nakedness of the bedchamber, with their infants in their arms, and how the ruffians of the accursed king, knowing their prey by their cries, ran after them, caught the mother by the hair and the bairn by the throat, and, in one act, flung the innocent to the stones and trampled out its life. Then he paused, and said, in a soft and thankful voice, that in the horrors of Bethlehem there was still much mercy; for the idolatrous dread of Herod prompted him to slay but young children, whose blameless lives were to their weeping parents an assurance of their acceptance into heaven. "What then," he cried, "are we to think of that night, and of that king, and of that people, among whom, by whom, and with whom, the commissioned murderer twisted his grip in the fugitive old man's grey hairs, to draw back his head that the knife might the surer reach his heart? With what eyes, being already blinded with weeping, shall we turn to that city where the withered hands of the grandmother were deemed as weapons of war by the strong and black-a-vised slaughterer, whose sword was owre vehemently used for a' the feckless remnant of life it had to cut! But deaths like these were brief and blessed compared to other things--which, Heaven be praised, I have not the power to describe, and which, among this protestant congregation, I trust there is not one able to imagine, or who, trying to conceive, descries but in the dark and misty vision the pains of mangled mothers; babes, untimely and unquickened, cast on the dung-hills and into the troughs of swine; of black-iron hooks fastened into the mouths, and driven through the cheeks of brave men, whose arms are tied with cords behind, as they are dragged into the rivers to drown, by those who durst not in fair battle endure the lightning of their eyes. O, Herod!--Herod of Judea--thy name is hereafter bright, for in thy bloody business thou wast thyself nowhere to be seen. In the vouts and abysses of thy unstained palace, thou hidst thyself from the eye of history, and perhaps humanely sat covering thine ears with thy hands to shut out the sound of the wail and woe around thee. But this Herod--let me not call him by so humane a name. No: let all the trumpets of justice sound his own to everlasting infamy--Charles