in such cant.  Your lot is a hard one.  The battle of life has gone against you—­whether by your own fault or by hard fortune, it matters not, so far as the fact is concerned; this thanksgiving-day finds you locked in here, with broken lives, and wearing the badge of crime.  God alone knows the secrets of each throbbing heart before me, and how it is that you have come to this.  Fellow-men, children of my Father in heaven, putting myself for the moment in your place, the bitterness of your lot is real and terrible to me.  For some of you there is no happier prospect for this life than to toil within these walls by day, and sleep in yonder cells by night, through the weary, slow-dragging years, and then to die, with only the hands of hired attendants to wipe the death-sweat from your brows; and then to be put in a convict’s coffin, and taken up on the hill yonder, and laid in a lonely grave.  My God! this is terrible!”

An unexpected dramatic effect followed these words.  The heads of many of the convicts fell forward on their breasts, as if struck with sudden paralysis.  They were the men who were in for life, and the horror of it overcame them.  The silence was broken by sobbings all over the room.  The officers and visitors on the platform were weeping.  The angel of pity hovered over, the place, and the glow of human sympathy had melted those stony hearts.  A thousand strong men were thrilled with the touch of sympathy, and once more the sacred fountain of tears was unsealed.  These convicts were men, after all, and deep down under the rubbish of their natures there was still burning the spark of a humanity not yet extinct.  It was wonderful to see the softened expression of their faces.  Yes, they were men, after all, responding to the voice of sympathy, which had been but too strange to many of them all their evil lives.  Many of them had inherited hard conditions; they were literally conceived in sin and born in iniquity; they grew up in the midst of vice.  For them pure and holy lives were a moral impossibility.  Evil with them was hereditary, organic, and the result of association; it poisoned their blood at the start, and stamped itself on their features from their cradles.  Human law, in dealing with these victims of evil circumstance, can make little discrimination.  Society must protect itself, treating a criminal as a criminal.  But what will God do with them hereafter?  Be sure he will do right.  Where little is given, little will be required.  It shall be better for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment than for Chorazin and Bethsaida.  There is no ruin without remedy, except that which a man makes for himself by abusing mercy, and throwing away proffered opportunity.  Thoughts like these rushed through the preacher’s mind, as he stood there looking in the tear-bedewed faces of these men of crime.  A fresh tide of pity rose in his heart, that he felt came from the heart of the all-pitying One.