I have a right as a clergyman to do so:  I have a duty as a clergyman to do so.  For your being townsmen of this place is not a mere material accident depending on your living in one house instead of another.  It is a spiritual matter; it is a question of eternity.  Your souls and spirits influence each other; your tastes, opinions, tempers, habits, make those of your neighbours better or worse; you feel it in yourselves daily.  Look at it as a proof that, whether you will or not, you are one body, of which all the members must more or less suffer and rejoice together; that you have a common weal, a common interest; that God has knit you together; that you cannot part yourselves even if you will; and that you can be happy and prosperous only by acknowledging each other as brothers, and by doing to each other as you would they should do unto you.

It may be hard at times to bring this thought home to our minds:  but it is none the less true because we forget it; and if we do not choose to bring it home to our own minds, it will be sooner or later brought home to them whether we choose or not.

For bear in mind, that St. Paul does not say, if one member suffers, all the rest ought to suffer with it:  he says that they do suffer with it.  He does not say merely, that we ought to feel for our fellow townsmen; he says, that God has so tempered the body together as to force one member to have the same care of the others as of itself; that if we do not care to feel for them, we shall be made to feel with them.  One limb cannot choose whether or not it will feel the disease of another limb.  If one limb be in pain, the whole body must be uneasy, whether it will or not.  And if one class in a town, or parish, or county, be degraded, or in want, the whole town, or parish, or county, must be the worse for it.  St. Paul is not preaching up sentimental sympathy:  he is telling you of a plain fact.  He is not saying, ’It is a very fine and saintly thing, and will increase your chance of heaven, to help the poor.’  He is saying, ’If you neglect the poor, you neglect yourself; if you degrade the poor, you degrade yourself.  His poverty, his carelessness, his immorality, his dirt, his ill-health, will punish you; for you and he are members of the same body, knit together inextricably for weal or woe, by the eternal laws according to which the Lord Jesus Christ has constituted human society; and if you break those laws, they will avenge themselves.’—­My friends, do we not see them avenge themselves daily?  The slave-holder refuses to acknowledge that his slave is a member of the same body as himself; but he does not go unpunished:  the degradation to which he has brought his slave degrades him, by throwing open to him. the downward path of lust, laziness, ungoverned and tyrannous tempers, and the other sins which have in all ages, slowly but surely, worked the just ruin of slave-holding states.  The sinner is his own tempter, and the sinner is