their asses might bear his name, but their own lives and liberty must
answer to it.

Israel looked on at all with an equal mind, neither flinching at his
indignities nor glorying in his power. He beheld the wreck of families
without remorse, and heard the wail of women and the cry of children
without a qualm. Neither did he delight in the sufferings of them that
had derided him. His evil impulse was a higher matter--his faith in
justice had been broken up. He had been wrong. There was no such thing
as justice in the world, and there could, therefore, be no such thing
as injustice. There was no thing but the blind swirl of chance, and the
wild scramble for life. The man had quarrelled with God.

But Israel's heart was not yet dead. There was one place, where he who
bore himself with such austerity towards the world was a man of great
tenderness. That place was his own home. What he saw there was enough to
stir the fountains of his being--nay, to exhaust them, and to send him
abroad as a river-bed that is dry.

In that first hour of his abasement, after he had been confounded before
the enemies whom he had expected to confound, Israel had thought of
himself, but Ruth's unselfish heart had even then thought only of the
babe.

The child was born blind and dumb and deaf. At the feast of life there
was no place left for it. So Ruth turned her face from it to the wall,
and called on God to take it.

"Take it!" she cried--"take it! Make haste, O God, make haste and take
it!"