together again and flung them into one prison.  They were convicted and condemned to death.  There came a fatal morning to this guilty pair, when the sun rose upon them and found them full of health and strength, yet in one short hour they must be dead.  They were taken into the prison chapel according to custom, and from the chapel they must pass at once to the gallows.  Now it so happened that the direct path from the chapel to the gallows was blocked up by some repairs that were going on in the prison, so the condemned were obliged to make a long circuit.  It was one of the largest of our old prisons, a huge, irregular building, constructed with no simplicity of design, and one set of officers did not always know at once what was going on in a distant department.  Hence it befell that in a certain passage of the jail the condemned and their attendants came suddenly upon a new-made grave!  Stones had been taken up, and a grave dug in this passage.  The workmen had but just completed it.  The grave filled up the passage, which was narrow and but little used.  The men who accompanied the murderers paused, abashed and chilled.  The murderers paused and looked at one another; no words can describe that look!  Planks were put down, and they walked over their own grave to their death.  Is there a skeptic who tells me this was chance?  Then I tell him he is a credulous fool to believe that chance can imitate omniscience, omnipotence and holiness so inimitably.  In this astounding fact of exact retribution I see nothing that resembles chance.  I see the arm of God and the finger of God.  His arm dragged the murderers to the gallows, His finger thrust the heartless, cruel miscreants across the grave that was yawning for their doomed bodies!  Tremble, ye cruel, God hates ye!  Men speak of a murder—­and sometimes, by way of distinction, they say ‘a cruel murder.’  See, now, what a crime cruelty must be, since it can aggravate murder, the crime before which all other sins dwindle into nothing.”

Of minor cruelties that do not attack life itself the most horrible he thought was cruelty to women.  Here the man must trample on every manly feeling, on the instinct and the traditions of sex, on the opinion of mankind, on the generosity that goes with superior strength and courage.  A man who is cruel to a woman is called a brute, but if the brutes could speak they would appeal against this phrase as unjust to them.  What animal but man did you ever see maltreat a female of his species?  The brutes are not such beasts as bad, cruel men are.  Or if you ever saw such a monstrosity the animal that did it was some notorious coward, such as the deer, which I believe is now and then guilty in a trifling degree of this dirty sin, being a rank coward.  But who ever saw a lion or a dog or any courageous animal let himself down to the level of a cowardly man so far as this?