shops, and shops that profess to sell "below cost,"—regarding them as the "mansions of cruelty,"—as the places where souls and bodies are used up, and where blood and sinews are disposed of by weight and measure. Make up your mind to pay a fair and remunerative price for every article you purchase; and if you cannot afford to do that—go without. That is the Christian rule: and the man or woman who will not exercise sufficient self-denial to do that, is not entitled, we conceive, to the character of being religious, or benevolent, or even honorable and just.
It is in these little ways, that society is to be reformed; it is by these private individual actions, chiefly, that the public good is to be attained, and poverty and wretchedness to be banished from the world. Littles compounded make up the whole—minutes repeated make the year. There is no doubt, indeed, that when the spirit of Christian justice and benevolence has thus once taken root in the heart, and has begun to put itself forth in these private ways,—then, also, men may, in their kindness of feeling, assemble together, and devise plans of united action for the general good. This will naturally follow. Societies for various benevolent objects will be formed: and at length even the legislative power will be reached, and public enactments will be passed for the relief of distress, and for the increase of the general comfort and welfare. But these things will be last, not first. Indeed, to be truly beneficial, legislative enactments will in general employ themselves rather in removing obstructions to the operation of principles of justice and benevolence existing in individual minds, and to the free circulation of worldly goods through
