shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on; and they shall scourge Him and put Him to death.  Do you ever think of your Lord in His shame?  How they made a fool of Him, as we say.  How they took off His own clothes and put on Him now a red cloak and now a white; how they put a sword of lath in His hand, and a crown of thorns on His head; how they bowed the knee before Him, and asked royal favours from Him; and then how they spat in His face, and struck Him on the cheek, while the whole house rang with shouts of laughter.  And, then, the last indignity of man, how they stripped Him naked and lashed His naked and bleeding body to a whipping-post.  And how they wagged their heads and put out their tongues at Him when He was on the tree, and invited Him to come down and preach to them now, and they would all become His disciples.  Did not Shame say the simple truth when he warned Faithful that religion had always and from the beginning made its followers the ridicule of their times?

If you are really going to be a religious man, Shame went on, you will have to carry about with you a very tender conscience, and a more unmanly and miserable thing than a tender conscience I cannot conceive.  A tender conscience will cost you something, let me tell you, to keep it.  If nothing else, a tender conscience will all your life long expose you to the mockery and the contempt of all the brave spirits of the time.  That also is true.  At any rate, a tender conscience will undoubtedly compel its possessor to face the brave spirits of the time.  There is a good story told to this present point about Sir Robert Peel, a Prime Minister of our Queen.  When a young man, Peel was one of the guests at a select dinner-party in the West-end of London.  And after the ladies had left the table the conversation of the gentlemen took a turn such that it could not have taken as long as the ladies were present.  Peel took no share in the stories or the merriment that went on, and, at last, he rose up and ordered his carriage, and, with a burning face, left the room.  When he was challenged as to why he had broken up the pleasant party so soon, he could only reply that his conscience would not let him stay any longer.  No doubt Peel felt the mocking laughter that he left behind him, but, as Shame said to Faithful, the tenderness of the young statesman’s conscience compelled him to do as he did.  But we are not all Peels.  And there are plenty of workshops and offices and dinner-tables in our own city, where young men who would walk up to the cannon’s mouth without flinching have not had Peel’s courage to protest against indecency or to confess that they belonged to an evangelical church.  If a church is only sufficiently unevangelical there is no trial of conscience or of courage in confessing that you belong to it.  But as Shame so ably and honestly said, that type of religion that creates a tender conscience in its followers, and sets them to watch their words and their