rings a man into junctures and into companionships, and it
puts offices and endurances upon one such as try a man if he has any
greatness of spirit about him at all. This life on which you are
entering, said Shame, will cost you many a blush before you are done with
it. You will lay yourself open to many a scoff. The Puritan religion,
and all the ways of that religious fraternity, are peculiarly open to the
shafts of ridicule. Now, all that was quite true. There was no denying
the truth of what Shame said. And Faithful felt the truth of it all, and
felt it most keenly, as he confessed to Christian. The blood came into
my face as the fellow spake, and what he said for a time almost beat me
out of the upward way altogether. But in this dilemma also all true
Christians can fall back, as Faithful fell back, upon the example of
their Master. In this as in every other experience of temptation and
endurance, our Lord is the forerunner and the example of His people. Our
Lord was in all points tempted like as we are, and among all His other
temptations He was tempted to be ashamed of His work on earth and of the
life and the death His work led Him into. He must have often felt
ashamed at the treatment He received during His life of humiliation, as
it is well called; and He must often have felt ashamed of His disciples:
but all that is blotted out by the crowning shame of the cross. We hang
our worst criminals rather than behead or shoot them, in order to heap up
the utmost possible shame and disgrace upon them, as well as to execute
justice upon them. And what the hangman's rope is in our day, all that
the cross was in our Lord's day. And, then, as if the cross itself was
not shame enough, all the circumstances connected with His cross were
planned and carried out so as to heap the utmost possible shame and
humiliation upon His head. Our prison warders have to watch the
murderers in their cells night and day, lest they should take their own
life in order to escape the hangman's rope; but our Lord, keenly as He
felt His coming shame, said to His horrified disciples, Behold, we go up
to Jerusalem, when the Son of Man 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