nnulled.
Philanthropy should be tender, but not weak; and if tears are shed and
bouquets of flowers sent, it should rather be to the victims of crime,
than to the criminal. But when a man is crushed with a sense of guilt,
and down on the ground, that is not the time to spurn him; when disgrace
is added to trouble, friends must not stand aloof. Many a poor fellow is
driven to suicide by this course who might have been saved by kindness
and brought to repentance.

"Willing's dashing friends, by whose example he had been helped in the
downward career, who had eaten his dainty little suppers and enjoyed his
society, now forsook him and held up their hands in horror at his
conduct--it was so disreputable! I may be wrong, but I can't help
despising men and women who share a poor fellow's prosperity and fall
off in his adversity; giving an additional kick, if need be, to send him
down the hill. Of all his gay companions not one stood by him on his
trial, or said one word of pity, hope, or cheer, when he was condemned.
The friendship of the world is a hollow thing, more unsubstantial than a
bubble. It seems to me that nothing is so hardening to the heart as
self-indulgence, luxurious living, idleness, the absence of any high aim
in life, or any earnest effort for the life beyond. Certain it is the
summer friends all vanished; their friendship wilted like flowers before
a frost.

"That was the time for Howard and me to act like men. We were busy, very
busy, but we took turns to stand by him, and show that we had not
forgotten 'auld lang syne' and boyish days. Poor fellow! he wept then.
Well did he know that we would be the last to extenuate his crime, but
he saw that we pitied him while we condemned his sin. He spoke the first
words of genuine repentance, or what looked like it, then and there.

"After his condemnation, when immured in prison walls, dressed in
convict garb, and fed on prison fare, we visited him whenever the rules
allowed it. We found him quite broken up--thoroughly humiliated, ready
to despair of God's mercy as well as man's forgiveness. He was in the
depths of trial, all the waves and the billows had gone over him, the
deeps had swallowed him up, as the Psalmist poetically and truly says.
We could not in conscience say one word that might lessen the weight of
his guilt, but we could point him to the Lamb of God that taketh away
the sin not of one only, but of the whole world. We could tell him that
Christ c