been pitched over the battlements. The mote in their neighbor's
eyes--so small that it takes a microscope to find it--gives them more
trouble than the beam which obscures their own optics. With air
sometimes supercilious and sometimes Pharisaical, and always
blasphemous, they take the razor of the divine judgment and sharpen it
on the hone of their own hard hearts, and then go to work on men
sprawled out at full length under disaster, cutting mercilessly. They
begin by soft expressions of sympathy and pity and half praise, and,
lather the victim all over before they put on the sharp edge.

Let us be careful how we shoot at others lest we take down the wrong
one, remembering the servant of King William Rufus who shot at a deer,
but the arrow glanced against a tree and killed the king. Instead of
going out with shafts to pierce, and razors to cut, we had better
imitate the friend of Richard Coeur de Lion, who, in the war of the
Crusades, was captured and imprisoned, but none of his friends knew
where. So his loyal friend went around the land from stronghold to
stronghold, and sung at each window a snatch of song that Richard
Coeur de Lion had taught him in other days. And one day, coming before
a jail where he suspected his king might be incarcerated, he sung two
lines of song, and immediately King Richard responded from his cell
with the other two lines, and so his whereabouts were discovered, and
immediately a successful movement was made for his liberation. So let
us go up and down the world with the music of kind words and
sympathetic hearts, serenading the unfortunate, and trying to get out
of trouble men who had noble natures, but, by unforeseen
circumstances, have been incarcerated, thus liberating kings. More
hymn-book and less razor.

Especially ought we to be apologetic and merciful toward those who,