post-office, without a word being spoken, how much is done for her before that letter reaches its destination!  The hands of unknown brethren will receive it, and transmit it; rapid trains will hurry it over leagues of railways; splendid steamships will sail with it, and hundreds of busy hands will pass it from port to port, from land to land.  It is watched day and night, through calm and hurricane, and precious lives are risked to keep it in security, until in silence and in safety, after months of travel, it is delivered from the mother’s hand into the hand of her child.

And thus it is that, whether we choose it or not, we are placed by God as “members one of another,” so that we cannot, if we would, separate ourselves from our brother.  For good or evil, prosperity or adversity, we are bound up with him in the bundle of this all-pervading and mysterious life.  If one member suffers or rejoices, all are compelled in some degree to share his burden of joy or sorrow.  Let disease, for example, break out in one district or kingdom, and, like a fire, it will rush onward, passing away from the original spot of outbreak, and involving families and cities far away in its desolating ruin.  Let war arise in one portion of the globe, it smites another.  The passion or the pride of some rude chief of a barbarous tribe in Africa or New Zealand, or the covetousness and selfish policy of some party in America, tell upon a poor widow in her lonely garret in the darkest corner of a great city; and she may thus be deprived of her labour through the state of commerce, as really as if the hand of the foreigner directly took her only handful of meal out of the barrel, or extinguished the cruise of oil, leaving her in poverty and darkness to watch over her dying child.

Now all this system of dependence, as we have said, is beyond our will.  We do not choose it, but are compelled to accept of it.  It is a fact or power, like birth or death, with which we have to do in spite of us.  No questions are asked by the great King as to whether we will have it so or not; yet of what infinite importance to us for good or evil is this great law of God’s government.  We are thus made to feel that a will higher than ours reigns, and that by that supreme will we are so united to one another, that no man can live for himself or die for himself alone; that we are our brothers keeper, and he ours; that we cannot be indifferent to his social well-being without suffering in our own; that our selfishness, which would injure him, must return in some form to punish ourselves; and that such is the ordained constitution of humanity, that though love and a consistent selfishness start from different points, they necessarily lead to the same point, and make it our interest, as it is our duty, to love our neighbour as ourselves.