prosperity. Were charity insufficient to redeem our offences, we might certainly think ourselves entitled to complain, says a holy father; we might take it ill, that God had deprived men of so easy a mean of salvation; at least might we say that, could we but open the gates of heaven through the means of riches, and purchase with our whole wealth the glory of the holy, we then should be happy. Well, my brethren, continues the holy father, profit by this privilege, seeing it is granted to you; hasten, before your riches moulder away, to deposit them in the bosom of the poor, as the price of the kingdom of heaven. The malice of men might perhaps have deprived you of them; your passions might have perhaps swallowed them up; the turns of fortune might have transferred them to other hands; death, at last, would sooner or later have separated you from them: ah! charity alone deposits them beyond the reach of all these accidents; it renders you their everlasting possessor; it lodges them in safety in the eternal tabernacles, and gives you the right of for ever enjoying them in the bosom of God himself.
Are you not happy in being able to assure to yourself admittance into heaven by means so easy; — in being able, by clothing the naked, to efface from the book of divine justice the obscenities, the luxury, and the irregularities of your younger years; — in being able, by filling the hungry, to repair all the sensualities of your life; — lastly, in being able, by sheltering innocence in the asylums of compassion, to blot out from the remembrance of God the ruin of so many souls, to whom you have been a stumbling-block? Great God! what goodness to man, to consider as meritorious a virtue which costs so little to the heart; to number in our favour feelings of humanity of which we could never divest ourselves, without being, at the same time divested of our nature; to be willing to accept, as the price of an eternal kingdom, frail riches, which we even enjoy only through thy bounty, which we could never continue to possess, and from which, after a momentary and fleeting enjoyment, we must at last be separated! Nevertheless, mercy is promised to him who shall have shown it; a sinner, still feeling to the calamities of his brethren, will not continue long insensible to the inspirations of heaven; grace still reserves claims upon a heart in which charity has not altogether lost its influence; a good heart cannot long continue a hardened one; that principle of humanity alone, which operates in rendering the heart feeling for the wants of others, is a preparation, as it were, for penitence and salvation; and while charity still acts in the heart, a happy conversion is never to be despaired of. Love, then, the poor as your brethren; cherish them as your offspring; respect them as Jesus Christ himself, in order that he say to you on the great day, "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; I was naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me: for, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
