Catch Him in His words.
Eastern spies
The course pursued by the enemies of our Lord does not seem strange to anyone who knows anything of the surveillance which a Hindoo uris establishes over anyone whose sayings or doings it may be of importance for him to know. For instance, Major T-, the agent for the Viceroy at the court of the Nawab Moorshedabad, complains that his house is as full of spies as it is of servants, nearly all of whom, he suspects, are in the pay of the Nawab. One servant, who pretended not to know a word of English, was discovered at length to know it well, and great was the major’s disgust at the discovery; for this man was in attendance at the table, where of course he would have ample opportunities of hearing his master’s opinions expressed in all the confidence of social intercourse. One of the punkah bearers, too, was found to be a quite well-to-do man. His position was a most menial one, yet its duties took him within sight and hearing of his master many times in the day. It was suspected that the Nawab was making it worth his while to submit to the drudgery of so mean a post. (A Missionary’s Notes.)
We know that Thou art true.-
Concerned only to do right
“What I must do,” says Emerson, “is all that concerns me, and not what people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what us your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to look after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
Moral fearlessness
In Scotland, Knox arose, of whom the Regent Morton said, “Here lies one who never feared the face of man;” who said himself that “he had locked in the faces of many angry men.” When he was working in chains on the galleys in France, they brought him an image of the Virgin, and bade him worship the mother of God. “Mother of God,” he exclaimed, “it is a pented bredd” (or hoard), and he flung it into the river to sink or swim. “Who are you?” said Mary Queen of Scots to him, “that presume to school the nobles and sovereign of this realm?” “Madam,” he answers, “a subject born within the same.” “Have you hope?” they ask him on his death bed, when he can no longer speak; and lifting his hand he pointed upwards with his finger, and so, pointing to heaven, he died.