How I do dislike the behavior of those persons who, when people are unfortunate, say:  “I told you so—­getting punished—­served him right.”  If those I-told-you-so’s got their desert they would long ago have 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, while they have great faults, have also great virtues.  Some people are barren of virtues.  No weeds verily, but no flowers.  I must not be too much enraged at a nettle along the fence if it be in a field containing forty acres of ripe Michigan wheat.  At the present time, naturalists tell us, there is on the sun a spot twenty thousand miles long, but from the brightness and warmth I conclude it is a good deal of a sun yet.

Again, when I read in my text that the Lord shaves with the hired razor of Assyria the land of Judea, I bethink myself of the precision of God’s providence.  A razor swung the tenth part of an inch out of the right line means either failure or laceration, but God’s dealings never slip, and they do not miss by the thousandth part of an inch the right direction.  People talk as though things in this world were at loose ends.  Cholera sweeps across Marseilles and Madrid and Palermo, and we watch anxiously.  Will the epidemic sweep Europe and America?  People say, “That will entirely depend on whether inoculation is a successful experiment; that will depend entirely on quarantine regulations; that will depend on the early or late appearance of frost; that epidemic is pitched into the world, and it goes blundering across the continents, and it is all guess-work and an appalling perhaps.”