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"'They clothed him with purple, and platted a crown of thorns and put it on his head...." She read obediently: "'And when the sixth hour was come ... and when the sixth hour was come there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice.... And Jesus cried with a loud voice ... with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost."
The sowers are too few, and the seed is too precious to be thrown away and lost among the thorns and stones." Last, but by no means least, the admirable physical culture that goes on in the kindergarten is all in the right direction. Physiologists know as much about morality as ministers of the gospel.
The Great Teacher dealt what ought to have been the final blow to this infinite irrelevancy by a single question, "Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles?" Why, then, did the Great Teacher not educate His followers fully? Why did He not tell us, for example, how such a thing as Rest might be obtained? The answer is that HE DID. But plainly, explicitly, in so many words?
No one is allowed to ascend them except upon his knees, and the stains of blood falling from the wounds caused by the Saviour's crown of thorns are pointed out. Those believe who can and will. There is a vault under the church, reached by a trap-door in the floor, which, by some remarkable property, has preserved undecayed the bodies of twenty-five monks.
There were blocks of stone everywhere in the wildest confusion, and among them here and there great straggling patches of unwholesome-looking, fleshily-lobed prickly-pears with their horrible thorns. Now and then, too, were miserable, dried-up karroo-bushes, starved among the great blocks above the rich green hollow where Sandho grazed.
"If they're good people, why should we be afeard o' them? No, I'm not." "Put the thorns out, I bid you again." "Divil a chip, mother dear; if your own evil conscience or your dirty cowardice makes you afeard o' the fairies, don't think I am. I don't care that about them.
But ye have a custom, that I should release unto you one at the passover: will ye therefore that I release unto you the King of the Jews? Then cried they all again, saying, Not this man, but Barabbas. Now Barabbas was a robber. Then Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged him. And the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and they put on him a purple robe,
Peter's advice and the Psalmist's advice; if they will go on coveting and scheming about money, and how they may get money; if they will go on being neither pitiful, courteous, nor forgiving, and hating and maligning whether it be those who differ from them in doctrine, or those who they fancy have injured them, or those who merely are their rivals in the race of life; then they are but too likely to find this world a thorny place, because they themselves raise the thorns; and a disorderly place, because their own tempers and desires are disorderly; and a wilderness, because they themselves have run wild, barbarians at heart, however civilised in dress and outward manners.
Under that blighting shadow, although the stalks may grow tall and the husks develop themselves in their own exquisite natural forms, no solid seed is formed or ripened. On the spot which the thorns usurped, the reaper gathers only straw and chaff. How vivid on both its sides is the picture, and how truthfully it represents the case!
The squirrels who were so clean and careful, and so fond of their children, thought the hedgehogs were very bad creatures indeed. "It is just like them to have dirty sticky thorns around them instead of nice clean fur," said the squirrel's wife. "But, my dear," said the squirrel, "every animal can't have fur."
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