The murderer had been properly tried and convicted. His mother begged the citizens to rescue her son when he was brought out from the jail to suffer punishment, but the father foreseeing this had the sentence carried out in the prison, and young Lynch was hanged from the prison window.
The elder Lynch's sense of duty must have been very strong indeed to enable him to make his feelings as a father give way to his conscience as a magistrate.
General Gordon sacrificed his life to his sense of duty. When he was besieged at Khartum he could have got away himself had he liked, but he considered it his duty to remain with the Egyptians whom he had brought there although he had no admiration for them. So he stuck to them and when at last the place was captured by the enemy he was killed.
NOTES TO INSTRUCTORS
Religion.
Charles Stelzle, in his "Boys of the Streets and How to Win Them," says:
Sometimes we are so much concerned about there being enough religion in our plans for the boy that we forget to leave enough boy in the plans. According to the notions of some, the ideal boys' club would consist of prayer meetings and Bible classes, with an occasional missionary talk as a treat, and perhaps magic lantern views of the Holy Land as a dizzy climax.
Religion can and ought to be taught to the boy, but not in a milk-and-watery way, or in a mysterious and lugubrious manner; he is very ready to receive it if it is shown in its heroic side and as a natural every-day quality in every proper man, and it can be well introduced to boys through the study of Nature; and to those who believe scouting to be an unfit subject for Sunday instruction, surely the study of God's work is at least proper for that day. There is no need for this instruction to be dismal, that is, "all tears and texts." Arthur Benson, writing in the Cornhill Magazine, says there are four Christian virtues, not three. They are—Faith, Hope, Charity—and Humour. So also in the morning prayer of Robert Louis Stevenson:
The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man—help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces. Let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give us to go blithely on our business all this day. Bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonoured, and grant us in the end the gift of sleep.