have exhausted, and who, in their humble dwellings, drag on the wretched remains of dotage and poverty; those whom a languishing health renders incapable of labour, their only resource against indigence and want; those whom sex and age expose to seduction, and whose innocence you might have been enabled to preserve. Behold what is required, and what, with every right to justice, is exacted from you; behold the poor with whom the Lord hath charged you, and for whom you shall answer to him; the poor, whom he leaveth on the earth only for your sake, and to whom his providence hath assigned no other resource than your wealth and your bounty.
Now, are they even known to you? Do you charge their pastors to make them known to you? Are these the cares which occupy you, when you show yourself in the midst of your lands and possessions? Ah! it is with cruelty to screw your claims from the hands of these unfortunate people; it is to tear from their bowels the innocent price of their toil, without regard to «their want, to the misery of the times which you allege to us, to their tears, and often to their despair:— what shall I say? It is perhaps to crush down their weakness, to be their tyrant, and not their lord and their father. O God! cursest thou not these cruel generations, and these riches of iniquity? Dost thou not stamp upon them the marks of misfortune and desolation, and which shall soon blast the source of their families; which wither the root of a proud posterity; which produce domestic discord, public disgraces, the fall, and total extinction of houses? Alas! we are sometimes astonished to see fortunes apparently the best established, go to wreck in an instant; those ancient, and formerly so illustrious names fallen into obscurity, no longer to offer to our view but the melancholy wrecks of their ancient splendour; and their estates become the property of their rivals, or perhaps of their own servants. Ah! could we investigate the source of their misfortunes; if their ashes, and the pompous wrecks, which in the pride of their monuments remain to us of their glory, could speak, — Do you see, they would say to us, these sad marks of our grandeur? It is the tears of the poor, whom we neglected, whom we oppressed, which have gradually sapped, and at last have totally overthrown them: their cries have drawn down the thunder of Heaven upon our palaces. The Lord hath blown upon our superb edifices, and upon our fortune, and hath dissipated them like dust. Let the name of the poor be honourable in your sight, if you wish that your names may never perish in the memory of men. Let compassion sustain your houses, if you wish that your posterity be not buried under their ruins. Become wise at our cost; and let our misfortunes, in teaching you our faults, teach you also to shun them.
And behold, my brethren, (that I may say something respecting it before I conclude,) the first advantage of Christian charity; blessings even in this world. The bread, blessed by our Saviour, multiplies in the hands of the apostles who distribute it; five thousand are satisfied; and twelve baskets can hardly contain the remnants
