tears to the chimerical adventures of a theatrical personage, — we honour fictitious misfortunes with real sensibility, — we depart from a representation with hearts still moved for the disasters of a fabulous hero, — and a member of Jesus Christ, an inheritor of heaven, and your brother, whom you encounter in your way from thence, perhaps sinking under disease and penury, and who wishes to inform you of the excess of his sufferings, finds you callous; and you turn your eyes with disgust from that spectacle, and deign not to listen to him? and you quit him even with a rudeness and brutality which tend to wring his heart with sorrow! Inhuman soul! have you, then, left all your sensibility on an infamous theatre? Doth the spectacle of Jesus Christ suffering in one of his members offer nothing worthy of your pity? And, that your heart may be touched, must the ambition, the revenge, the voluptuousness, and all the other horrors of the pagan ages be revived.
But, it is not enough that we offer hearts feeling for the distresses which present themselves to our view: charity goes farther: it does not indolently await those occasions which chance may throw in its way; it knows how to search them out, and even to anticipate them itself. Last rule: the vigilance of charity. Jesus Christ waits not till those poor people address themselves to him and lay open their wants: he is the first to discover them: scarcely has he found them out, when, with Philip, he searches the means of relieving them. That charity which is not vigilant, anxious after the calamities of which it is yet ignorant, ingenious in discovering those which endeavour to remain concealed, which require to be solicited, pressed, and even importuned, resembles not the charity of Jesus Christ. We must watch, and penetrate the obscurity which shame opposes to our bounties. This is not a simple advice: it is the consequence of the precept of charity. The pastors, who, according to faith, are the fathers of the people, are obliged to watch over their spiritual concerns; and that is one of the most essential functions of their ministry. The rich and the powerful are established by God the fathers and the pastors of the poor according to the body: they are bound, then, to watch continually over their necessities. If, through want of vigilance, they escape their attention, they are guilty before God, of all the consequences, which a small succour in time would have prevented.
It is not, that you are required to find out all the secret necessities of a city; but care and attention are exacted of you: it is required, that you, who, through your wealth or birth, hold the first rank in a department, shall not be surrounded, unknown to you, with thousands of unfortunate fellow-creatures, who pine in secret, and whose eyes are continually wounded with the pomp of your train, and who, besides their wretchedness, suffer again, as I may say, in your prosperity: it is required, that you, who, amid all the pleasures of the court, or of the city, see flowing into your hands the fruits of the sweat and of the labour of so many unfortunate people, who inhabit your lands and your fields; it is required that you be acquainted with those whom the toils of industry and of age
