But there are those who pursue what they regard as "charitable work" as an excitement—an amusement—just as children are sometimes set to play with Scripture conversation cards, and puzzles out of the Old Testament, with a kind of feeling that the employment comes nearly to a religious exercise. There is as much danger {5} of these persons missing the true work of charity as there would be in the employment of paid officials—indeed, the latter would have one advantage; they would be less likely to be imposed upon by those who to obtain some special advantage would cringe and flatter. The first great difficulty in visiting and temporarily relieving the lower class of destitute poor, is to disabuse their minds of an inveterate notion that the benevolent visitor and distributor is paid by some occult society, of which the recipients of bounty know nothing, and for which they care very little. Unfortunately, the sharp determined amateur visitor, who "does a district" as other people with leisure do a flower show or a morning concert—but, alas! these very words of mine show how common is that lack of true charity of which I designed to speak. Who am I that I should sum up the disposition and the heart of my brother or my sister? Only I would say that this suspicion on the part of the ignorant poor, which is so often complained of—the notion that their interviewers are paid for the work of charity—can only yield to the conviction that the work itself is undertaken with warm living human sympathy. Before the true relief shall come to any man, it must come by faith. "With the heart man believeth unto righteousness," and in righteousness also. The two tendencies that are driving us away from charity to a kind of selfish economy, are the habit of "relieving our overcharged susceptibilities by secreting a guinea," and thinking we have thereby fulfilled the claims of religion and humanity, and the practice of going about seeking where we may find candidates for other people's guineas, and so becoming a kind of charitable {6} detectives, with an eye to reputation and advancement in the force. We are forgetting that heartfelt sympathy, that clasp of the hand and beam of the eye which will make even a cup of cold water a benefaction, if we have no more to give, or if the need goes no further than a refreshing draught, that shall be turned from water into wine by the power of loving fellowship. Or we may be saying, "Be ye clothed, and be ye fed," trusting to some other hand to do the necessary work, without having ourselves first wrought for the means of taking our part in it, either by a deep personal interest in the relieving institution or in the destitute recipient.