There is, thank God, a healthier feeling than of old abroad of late upon this point.  Men are learning more and more to regard such sufferers not as the victims of God’s wrath, but of human ignorance, vice, or folly.  And it was with deep satisfaction that I read in the last Report of the Schools for the Deaf and Dumb a statement of what were considered the most probable physical causes of deafness and dumbness, and a hope that it would be possible, hereafter, to prevent as well as cure those diseases.

Whether the causes assigned in that Report are the true ones, is a point of inferior importance for the moment.  The really important point is, that the principle should be allowed, the question raised, by a society, composed of religious men, and teaching to those poor deaf and dumb as almost their primary work that true religion which they are just as capable of receiving as we.  The right path has been entered—­the path which is certain in due time to lead to success.  And meanwhile our duty is, while we confess that it is the fault of society and not of God, that these afflicted ones exist among us—­it is our duty, I say, to cultivate and to develop to the highest every faculty, instinct, and power, in them which God’s order has preserved from the effects of man’s disorder; to feed the eye with fair and noble sights, though the ear be shut to soothing and inspiring sounds; to cultivate the intellect to such a pitch that it may be able to perform practical work, and if possible to earn a sufficient livelihood, even though the want of speech makes it impossible for them, deaf and dumb, to compete on equal terms with their fellow-men; to awaken in them, by religious training, teaching and worship, those purer and more unselfish emotions by which their hearts may become a field ready and prepared for God’s grace.  To do this; and to regard them, whenever we come in contact with them; not merely with pity, while we remember how much their intellects lose, in losing the whole world of sound; but with hope, when we see that through the one sense which is left they take in fully not only the meaning of the voluble hands which teach them, but more, the meaning of that meaning—­the spiritual truths and feelings which signs express; with wonder, not at the defect, but at the innate health which almost compensates for the want of hearing by concentrating its powers upon the sight; and lastly, with admiration for that humanity which, as it were imprisoned, fettered, maimed, yet can, by the God-given force of the immortal spirit, so burst its prison-bars, and rise, through hindrances which seem to us impassable, to the tenderest, the noblest, the purest, and most devout emotions.

SERMON VI.  THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT.

ST JOHN III. 8,

   The wind bloweth whither it listeth, and thou hearest the sound
   thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, or whither it goeth:  so
   is every one that is born of the Spirit.