Bible Commentaries

Ezekiel 35:5-6

See Dickens's description of France, in the first chapter of The Tale of Two Cities: "Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently."

For me there was but one sin, and that was cruelty, because I hated it; though Nature, for some inscrutable purpose of her own, almost teaches it as a virtue. All sins that did not include cruelty were merely sins against health or taste or common-sense or public expediency.

—George du Maurier in Peter Ibbetson.

References.—XXXV:10.—Spurgeon Sermons, vol. ix No536. XXXVI:9.—Ibid. vol. lii. No3001.