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CHRISTIAN LIBERALITY.
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approve themselves to our minds. A village of three or four hundred souls, for example, may accidentally have a greater claim on us, than a city of many thousands, if it be inhabited by those whose labour we daily employ, who minister to our wealth and comforts, and who naturally look to us for help. For the same reason, a town whence our comforts and luxuries are supplied, demands more of us than another, although of greater population, with which we are unconnected. We employ the shopkeepers and labourers of the place; we induce them to augment the scale of their business, to take apprentices and journeymen, many of whom probably are gathered from villages where they had the means of grace in abundance: is it nothing to us, that for our service they should be deprived of them? Nor need we be very rich to do something effectual. Whoever has an income of one thousand pounds, would be able, in many parts of the country, by saving only the tenth of it for seven or eight years, to build a church for five or six hundred worshippers, on a most respectable scale, and without any aid, beyond that which our societies are always ready to give wherever it is needed. Let him ask himself whether in those last gone by, he has enjoyed as much happiness (to leave the promised blessing for a moment out of our view) as the tenth thus expended would have procured for him?