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