ouses and
made themselves the doors that the slayers were obliged to hew in pieces
before they could enter in. He pictured the women flying along the
street, in the nakedness of the bedchamber, with their infants in their
arms, and how the ruffians of the accursed king, knowing their prey by
their cries, ran after them, caught the mother by the hair and the bairn
by the throat, and, in one act, flung the innocent to the stones and
trampled out its life. Then he paused, and said, in a soft and thankful
voice, that in the horrors of Bethlehem there was still much mercy; for
the idolatrous dread of Herod prompted him to slay but young children,
whose blameless lives were to their weeping parents an assurance of
their acceptance into heaven.

"What then," he cried, "are we to think of that night, and of that king,
and of that people, among whom, by whom, and with whom, the commissioned
murderer twisted his grip in the fugitive old man's grey hairs, to draw
back his head that the knife might the surer reach his heart? With what
eyes, being already blinded with weeping, shall we turn to that city
where the withered hands of the grandmother were deemed as weapons of
war by the strong and black-a-vised slaughterer, whose sword was owre
vehemently used for a' the feckless remnant of life it had to cut! But
deaths like these were brief and blessed compared to other
things--which, Heaven be praised, I have not the power to describe, and
which, among this protestant congregation, I trust there is not one able
to imagine, or who, trying to conceive, descries but in the dark and
misty vision the pains of mangled mothers; babes, untimely and
unquickened, cast on the dung-hills and into the troughs of swine; of
black-iron hooks fastened into the mouths, and driven through the cheeks
of brave men, whose arms are tied with cords behind, as they are dragged
into the rivers to drown, by those who durst not in fair battle endure
the lightning of their eyes. O, Herod!--Herod of Judea--thy name is
hereafter bright, for in thy bloody business thou wast thyself nowhere
to be seen. In the vouts and abysses of thy unstained palace, thou hidst
thyself from the eye of history, and perhaps humanely sat covering thine
ears with thy hands to shut out the sound of the wail and woe around
thee. But this Herod--let me not call him by so humane a name. No: let
all the trumpets of justice sound his own to everlasting infamy--Charles
the Ninth of France! An