How many men who now hold seats in the United States Senate or the House of Representatives do we even know the names of? How many of all that long procession of them who have been passing for more than a century though those halls of power have we so much as heard the names of? They have filed through those stately chambers to dusty death and oblivion, and the places which knew them once know them no more forever. A few names only are remembered among all the multitude of them, not because of the places they occupied or the power they wielded, but because while in those houses they chose the better part--chose not to busy themselves with shadows, with the things which perish, but seized and held fast to the eternal verities of justice and freedom and human brotherhood. The vast majority of them magnified their brief authority and neglected the opportunity which their offices offered them to link their names and official lives with some noble movement or measure for the betterment of their kind, for the lifting up of those who were down, the strengthening of those who were weak, the succor of those who were hard pressed by man's inhumanity to man. It is beautiful to defend those who can not defend themselves, to lift up the weak, to succor those who are ready to perish. It is heroic, divine, when the doing so involves peril and sacrifice of self. It is the essence of the Gospel preached and lived by one who spoke and lived as never man spoke and lived. It is simple and undefiled Christianity. Nothing avails to make Senator or President or people Christian but just this one thing--not race or color or creed, not learning and wealth and civilization--but kindness to God's poor, to Christ's little ones. Did you feed them when they were hungry; did you give them to drink when they were thirsty; did you visit and comfort them when they were in prison? Those who do these things to the humblest and the blackest of these little ones of the Republic have done them unto the divine Master, are in truth His disciples; and those who do them not are not His followers, whatever may be their profession, but quite the contrary. They have no part or lot with Him but belong to the evil forces of the world which are forever opposing the coming of His righteous Kingdom on earth when all men shall be brothers, when the strong shall everywhere bear the burdens of the weak.