There is no use in pleading our good intentions. The fathers of the Inquisition are ever ready with their plea of good intentions. The parent who breaks the spirit, and thus annihilates the moral liberty of his child, does it with the best intentions. The manœuvrer tells twenty lies a-day with the best intentions. There is, perhaps, no crime in whose defence good intentions may not with sincerity have been pleaded. The question is why, with evidence that we were wrong, daily and hourly before our eyes, we did not mend our methods. Thence arises the moral of this dreary lesson, that virtue, whether beneficence or any other, does not consist in formal and arbitrary practices, but in conformity to vital principles. Without regard to this essential truth, virtue may turn to vice before we are aware; and as a proof of it, we have been doing the pleasure of fiends under a persuasion that we were discharging the duty of Christians. We have exercised self-denial in our charity: but so did Simeon Stylobates in his piety, when he lived on the top of a pillar. We have toiled and suffered in our charity: but so did the pilgrims who walked with peas in their shoes to the sepulchre. Their piety and their sufferings were a mockery of Him they worshipped; and our charity has proved a scandal to the religion we profess. What follows? Not that piety and charity are a mockery and a delusion; but that Simeon did not understand the one, and we have most assuredly mistaken the other. One essential distinction between a comparatively rich and poor society is in the moral right which individuals have to dispose of their money in certain modes. Where capital abounds in proportion to the consumers, individuals are fully justified in giving away in whatsoever form and to whomsoever they please; as they give away that which leaves nobody destitute. But in a society where population abounds in proportion to capital, to give food and clothing to the idle while the industrious are debarred from earning it, is to take subsistence from him whose due it is, to give it to one who has no claim. Thus to violate justice can be no true charity. Where consumers abound in proportion to capital, it is obvious that the way to bestow most happiness is, not to take away one man’s share to give it to another, but to do what is possible towards creating another share in such a way as not to cause more want. In other words, almsgiving is the mode of charity appropriate to one state of society, and the establishment of provident associations, and the encouragement of emigration, and especially of education, are the modes of charity appropriate to another state of society. We have need enough of charity in our present state;—with hundreds of thousands of paupers in our parishes, and of half-starved artizans in our towns, and broken-spirited labourers in our villages. We have need enough of charity,—of the time of such as have leisure, and of the attention of the thoughtful, and of the