l for all
this week not speak about that man at all, anything either good or bad,
nor on that subject, nor will I let the conversation turn into that
channel at all if I can help it. And God will surely help us, till,
after weeks and years of such prayer and such practice, we shall by slow
degrees, and after many defeats, be able to say with the Psalmist, 'I
will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my tongue. I will keep my
mouth with a bridle. I will be dumb with silence. I will hold my peace
even from good.'

JUDGE HATE-GOOD

'Hear, O heads of Jacob, and ye princes of the house of Israel . . .
who hate the good and love the evil.'--Micah.

The portrait of Judge Hate-good in _The Pilgrim's Progress_ is but a poor
replica, as our artists say, of the portrait of Judge Jeffreys in our
English history books. I am sure you have often read, with astonishment
at Bunyan's literary power, his wonderful account of the trial of
Faithful, when, as Bunyan says, he was brought forth to his trial in
order to his condemnation. We have the whole ecclesiastical
jurisprudence of Charles and James Stuart put before us in that single
satirical sentence. But, powerful as Bunyan's whole picture of Judge
Hate-good's court is, it is a tame and a poor picture compared with what
all the historians tell us of the injustice and cruelty of the court of
Judge Jeffreys. Macaulay's portrait of the Lord Chief Justice of England
for ferocity and fiendishness beats out of sight Bunyan's picture of that
judge who keeps Satan's own seal in Bunyan's Book. Jeffreys was bred for
his future work at the bar of the Old Bailey, a bar already proverbial
for the licence of its tongue and for the coarseness of its cases.
Jeffreys served his apprenticeship for the service that our two last
Stuarts had in reserve for him so well, that he soon became, so his
beggared biographer describes him, the most consummate bully that ever
disgraced an English bench. The boldest impudence when he was a young
advocate, and the most brutal ferocity when he was an old judge, sat
equally secure on the brazen forehead of George Jeffreys. The real and
undoubted ability and scholarship of Jeffreys only made his wickedness
the more awful, and his whole career the greater curse both to those
whose tool he was, and to those whose blood he drank daily. Jeffreys
drank brandy and sang lewd songs all night, and he drank blood and cursed
and swore on the bench