fers himself into the condition of his fellowman, participates his state and prospects, and communicates alike with his painful and pleasurable feelings-that tendency which the Almighty has impressed upon our nature to restrain the force, and overrule the career, of those passions whose immediate object is selfgratification-a force which is ever threatening to bear away the mind from the circle of social concord, and to propel it (if we may so speak) in one direct, continuous, unbroken line of selfish and interested exertion-that principle of attraction in the rational universe-that law of kindred spirits, which, if not essential to the being of society, is, at least, the source of its virtue, and the fount of its purest enjoyment, the Christian religion would exalt into an active vital principle of social virtue-would render effectual to the fulfilment of all rectitude towards our neighbour, by indefinitely enlarging the sphere of its influence, or increasing the number of its objects. We say by indefinitely enlarging the sphere of its influence; for the whole worth of sympathy, as subservient to the practice of the right, is derived from its impartial nature, or the universality of its objects. As a limited and arbitrary principle, it is essentially perverted from this

purpose, and transmuted into an opposite quality. Instead of expanding and purifying the. heart, it nourishes and matures the unsocial and malevolent nature; exasperating all private and public animosity, the dissensions of friends, the feuds of families, the strife of sects and parties, and the hatred of nations. It multiplies the occasions of transgression, and extends the community of crime actually banding men together, and emboldening and inflaming them, in a war against justice, and tending to exterminate the love of man, the human being, our neighbour. It is the degenerate proneness of our sympathy to be continually contracting itself within some narrow circle, and expending itself upon particular individuals and communities; thus inclining us, in innumerable instances, to partake of the feelings, not of the sufferer, but of the doer of wrong; to appropriate his causeless or unappeasable anger, his contentious temper, or malignant purpose, and even the spirit which, without provocation, can work the evil of another. But, like the vital fluid in the animal frame, our sympathy must support the life of virtue by an uninterrupted, equable flow, though with a difference of volume, through the entire social body. Its merely local, partial activity is

symptomatic of irregularity and disorder in the moral functions. Christianity, we well know, inculcates a sympathy which is essentially philanthropic in its character. It allows no invidious prejudicating divisions of mankind into friends, and strangers, and enemies; but rejects such distinctions as abhorrent to its nature, and subversive of its purpose; and realizes in the principles of a common nature, and the universality of the divine law, a tie of brotherhood with every individual of the species, constituting every one our neighbour whose happiness is subject to our influence; who pleads his rights, or makes known his sufferings; or whose circumstances appeal to our justice and compassion.

And as the Gospel allows no exceptions in the objects of our sympathy, so it requires us to evince that sympathy in every one of those numerous relations which we may sustain towards them. It sanctions no exclusive or disproportionate attention to any one office of benevolence, or to any one claim which our neighbour may prefer to our regard for his welfare. We can scarcely be surprised, indeed, that mankind should regard the distribution of alms, or the communication of their property to the indigent, as the distinctive province of

benevolence, and appropriate to it the name of charity-not surely because that exercise of love to our neighbour is less obviously a duty than any other virtuous action whatsoever; for not more certainly does the instinct of man impel him to seek the relief of his necessities at the hand of his neighbour, than his reason and conscience bear testimony to the rectitude of that appeal which is made to his sympathy by his fellow-man. In truth, the duty of relieving the indigent and distressed, though commonly distinguished from justice in the ordinary acceptation of the latter, is an essential branch of that more comprehensive rule of equity which directs us to do unto others as we would they should do unto ourselves; and accordingly, no duty is more expressly enjoined both in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. But as property is the principal means of self-gratification, it is no less effectual as an instrument of charitable and philanthropic exertion. It is this which invests its possessors, in an eminent degree, with the power of doing good, of succouring and befriending their neighbour. With this we save our fellow-men from hunger, cold, and nakedness; we provide for the sick a physician, for the ignorant an instructor, for

the oppressed an advocate; we make the poorest of mankind partakers of the blessings which attend the progress of knowledge and the arts, and even engage in their behoof that exquisite ingenuity in which man seems especially to imitate the wisdom and goodness of the Creator, and aspires to work miracles in behalf of his species; repairing the defects of nature, supplying a destitution of the senses, imparting the uses of language to the speechless, and faculties of perception to the blind. -We need not wonder, as we have said, that the commendation and praises of charity should principally rest on the donors of their property to the poor and necessitous. It might rather surprise and humble a Christian people to reflect, that the extensive applicability of wealth to the promotion of the common welfare, is a consideration which operates so feebly as a motive to its acquisition. In the esteem of St. Paul, the ability to benefit his fellow-man was the choicest privilege which gold confers upon its possessor. Accordingly he enforces it as an incentive to industry, as a motive to productive labour:-" Let him that stole, steal no more; but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that