his own executioner:  he lies in wait for his own life (says Solomon) when he lies in wait for his brother’s.  Do you see the same law working in our own free country?  If you leave the poor careless and filthy, you can obtain no good servants:  if you leave them profligate, they make your sons profligate also:  if you leave them tempted by want, your property is unsafe:  if you leave them uneducated, reckless, improvident, you cannot get your work properly done, and have to waste time and money in watching your workmen instead of trusting them.  Why, what are all poor-rates and county-rates, if you will consider, but God’s plain proof to us, that the poor are members of the same body as ourselves; and that if we will not help them of our own free will, we shall find it necessary to help them against our will:  that if we will not pay a little to prevent them becoming pauperized or criminal, we must pay a great deal to keep them when they have become so?  We may draw a lesson—­and a most instructive one it is—­from the city of Liverpool, in which it was lately proved that crime—­and especially the crime of uneducated boys and girls—­had cost, in the last few years, the city many times more than it would cost to educate, civilize, and depauperize the whole rising generation of that city, and had been a tax upon the capital and industry of Liverpool, so enormous that they would have submitted to it from no Government on earth; and yet they had been blindly inflicting it upon themselves for years, simply because they chose to forget that they were their brothers’ keepers.

Look again at preventible epidemics, like cholera.  All the great towns of England have discovered, what you I fear are discovering also, that the expense of a pestilence, and of the widows and orphans which it creates, is far greater than the expense of putting a town into such a state of cleanliness as would defy the entrance of the disease.  So it is throughout the world.  Nothing is more expensive than penuriousness; nothing more anxious than carelessness; and every duty which is bidden to wait, returns with seven fresh duties at its back.

Yes, my friends, we are members of a body; and we must realize that fact by painful experience, if we refuse to realize it in public spirit and brotherly kindness, and the approval of a good conscience, and the knowledge that we are living like our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, who laboured for all but Himself, cared for all but Himself; who counted not His own life dear to Himself that by laying it down He might redeem into His own likeness the beings whom He had made; and who has placed us on this earth, each in his own station, each in his own parish, that we might follow in His footsteps, and live by His Spirit, which is the spirit of love and fellow-feeling, that new and risen life of His, which is the life of duty, honour, and self-sacrifice.

Yes.  Let us look rather at this brighter side of the question, my friends, than at the darker.  I will preach the Gospel to you rather than the Law.  I will appeal to your higher feelings rather than to your lower; to your love rather than your fear; to your honour rather than your self-interest.  It will be pleasanter for me:  it will meet with a more cordial response, I doubt not, from you.