In the afternoon Mr. Eden preached against cruelty.

“No crime is so thoroughly without excuse as this.  Other crimes have sometimes an adequate temptation, this never.  The path to other crimes is down-hill; to cruelty is up-hill.  In the very act, Nature, who is on the side of some crimes, cries out within us against this monstrous sin.  The blood of our victim flowing from our blows, its groans and sighs and pallor, stay the uplifted arm and appeal to the furious heart.  Wonderful they should ever appeal in vain.  Cruelty is not one of our pleasant vices, and the opposite virtues are a garden of delights:  ’Mercy is twice blessed, it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.’  God has written His abhorrence of this monstrous sin in letters of fire and blood on every page of history.”

Here he ransacked history, and gave them some thirty remarkable instances of human cruelty, and of its being punished in kind so strangely, and with such an exactness of retribution, that the finger of God seemed visible writing on the world—­“God hates cruelty.”

At the end of his examples he instanced two that happened under his own eye—­a favorite custom of this preacher.

“A man was tried in London for cruelty to animals; he was acquitted by a legal flaw, though the evidence was clear against him.  This man returned homeward triumphant.  The train in which he sat was drawn up by the side of a station.  An express-train passed on the up-line at full speed.  At the moment of passing the fly-wheel of the engine broke; a large fragment was driven into the air and fell upon the stationary train.  It burst through one of the carriages and killed a man upon the spot.  That man was seated between two other men, neither of whom received the slightest injury.  The man so singled out was the cruel man who had evaded man’s justice, but could not escape His hand who created the beasts as well as man, and who abhors all men who are cruel to any creature He has formed.

“A man and his wife conspired to rob and murder their friend and constant guest.  Determined to escape detection, they coldly prepared for the deed of blood.  Long before the murder they dug a hole in the passage leading from their parlor to their dining-room, and this hole was to receive the corpse of the man with whom meantime these heartless wretches eat bread day after day and drank his health at their own board.  Several times the unfortunate man walked with his host and hostess over this concealed hole, his destined tomb, before the time came to sacrifice him.  At last they murdered him and buried him in the grave they had prepared for him.  The deed done, spite of all their precaution fear fell on them and hatred, and they fled from the house where the corpse was and from each other, one to the north, one to the south.  Fled they ever so fast, or so far apart, justice followed to the north, justice followed to the south, and dragged the miscreants