Gratitude, though it can hardly be disjoined from love, is seldom cherished for the same person in the same degree with love. We love our beneficiaries more than our benefactors. We love those dependent upon us more than those on whom we depend. The mother’s love for her child is the strongest of human affections, and undoubtedly exceeds that even of the child for the mother to whom he owes every benefit and blessing under heaven. We may be fervently grateful to persons whom we have never seen; but there cannot be much vividness in our love for them. Love to God, whom we have not seen, needs to be kindled, renewed, and sustained by gratitude for the incessant flow of benefits from Him, and by the promise—contingent on character—of blessings immeasurable and everlasting. *Kindness* is benevolence for one’s _kind_,—a delight in their happiness and well-being, a readiness to perform friendly offices whenever and however they may be needed. In its lower forms it is designated as _good nature_; when intense and universal, it is termed _philanthropy_. It befits the individual man as a member of a race of kindred, and is deemed so essential an attribute of the human character, that he who utterly lacks it is branded as _inhuman_, while its active exercise in the relief of want and suffering is emphatically termed _humanity_. Pity is the emotion occasioned by the sight or knowledge of distress or pain. While without it there can be no genuine kindness, it may exist without kindness. There are persons tenderly sensitive to every form of suffering, who yet feel only for the sufferer, not with him, and who would regard and treat him coldly or harshly, if he were not a sufferer. In such cases, pity would seem to be a selfish feeling; and there can be no doubt that some men relieve distress and poverty, as they would remove weeds from a flower-bed, because they are offensive to the sight.