Health: Five Lay Sermons to Working-People — John Shaqi
Health: Five Lay Sermons to Working-PeopleBrown, John
Science
Health: Five Lay Sermons to Working-People
Brown, John
Child rearing; Health; Hygiene; Physician and patient
You remember our last sermon was mostly about your duties to the Doctor.
I am now going to speak about his duties to you; for you know it is a
law of our life, that there are no one-sided duties,--they are all
double. It is like shaking hands, there must be two at it; and both of
you ought to give a hearty grip and a hearty shake. You owe much to
many, and many owe much to you. The Apostle says, "Owe no man anything
but to love one another"; but if you owe that, you must be forever
paying it; it is always due, always running on; and the meanest and most
helpless, the most forlorn, can always pay and be paid in that coin, and
in paying can buy more than he thought of. Just as a farthing candle,
twinkling out of a cotter's window, and, it may be, guiding the gudeman
home to his wife and children, sends its rays out into the infinite
expanse of heaven, and thus returns, as it were, the light of the
stars, which are many of them suns. You cannot pass any one on the
street to whom you are not bound by this law. If he falls down, you help
to raise him. You do your best to relieve him, and get him home; and let
me tell you, to your great gain and honor, the poor are far more ready
and better at this sort of work than the gentlemen and ladies. You do
far more for each other than they do. You will share your last loaf; you
will sit up night after night with a neighbor you know nothing about,
just because he is your neighbor, and you know what it is to be
neighbor-like. You are more natural and less selfish than the fine
folks. I don't say you are better, neither do I say you are worse; that
would be a foolish and often mischievous way of speaking. We have all
virtues and vices and advantages peculiar to our condition. You know the
queer old couplet,--
"Them what is rich, them rides in chaises;
Them what is poor, them walks like blazes."
If you were well, and not in a hurry, and it were cold, would you not
much rather "walk like blazes" than ride listless in your chaise? But
this I know, for I have seen it, that according to their means, the poor
bear one another's burdens far more than the rich.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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