Such is our solemn duty; and it is important that it should be regarded in this light. Beneficence should not be merely the overflowing of a generous heart. This would be an unsafe and uncertain ground on which to place the principle of charitable distribution. Interesting objects indeed might not suffer from it, the orphan, the afflicted widow, decayed and broken age. Cold and insensible must be the heart that could shut up its sympathies from such petitioners. True beneficence however, cannot always be a delight. "It is not," says a powerful writer,[8] "an indulgence to the finer sensibilities of the mind, but according to the sober declarations of scripture, a work and a labor, a business in which you must encounter vexation, opposition, and fatigue, where you are not always to meet with that elegance which allures the fancy, or with that humble and retired adversity which interests the more tender propensities of the heart, but as a business, where reluctance must often be overcome by a sense of duty, and where, though opposed at every step by envy, disgust and disappointment, you are bound to persevere in obedience to the law of God, and the sober instigation of principle." Is it not well then, my brethren, to establish beneficence upon the broad ground of christian obligation, rather than commend it to you by the high gratifications which it sometimes affords? Are not the interests of the poor in this manner more effectually secured? If the grand principle can be established in your breasts, that you are to do good not simply because you delight in this work, but because the dictates of justice and the laws of God require you to be charitable, will you not be preserved from the indiscretions of a heated benevolence on the one hand, and from the cruelty and consequent punishment of selfishness and avarice on the other?