Natural benevolence is prone to claim the liberty and the merit that belong to pure spontaneity, and spurns the idea of duty or necessity. This claim might be allowed if the free emotions of kindness were sufficiently common, and sufficiently vigorous, to meet the large and constant demand of want and misery. But the contrary is the fact; and if it were not that an authoritative requisition, backed by the most solemn sanctions, laid its hand upon the sources of eleemosynary aid, the revenues of mercy would be slender indeed. Even the few who act from the impulse of the noblest motives, are urged on and sustained in their course of beneficence by a latent recollection that, though they move freely in advancing, they have no real liberty to draw back. If the entire amount of advantage which has accrued to the necessitous from the influence of Christianity could be computed, it would, no doubt, be found, that by far the larger share has been contributed, not by the few who might have done the same without impulsion, but by the many whose selfishness could never have been broken up except by the most peremptory appeals. To ensure, therefore, its large purpose of good-will to man, the law of Christ spreads out its claims very far beyond the circle of mere pity, or natural kindness; and in the most absolute terms demands, for the use of the poor, the ignorant, the wretched, (and demands from every one who names the name of Christ) the whole residue of talent, wealth, time, that may remain after primary claims have been satisfied. On this ground, when the zeal of self-denying benevolence has laid down its last mite, it does not deem itself to have exceeded the extent of Christian duty; but cheerfully assents to that rule of computing service which affirms that, "when we have done all, we are unprofitable servants; having performed only what we were commanded." Manifestly, for the purpose of giving the highest possible force and solemnity to that sense of obligation which impels the Christian to abound in every good work, the ostensible proof of religious sincerity, to be adduced in the momentous procedures of the last judgment, is made to consist in the fact of a life of beneficence. Those, and those only, shall inherit the prepared blessedness, who shall be found to have nourished, and clothed, and visited the Lord to his representatives—the poor. The "cursed" are those who have grudged the cost of mercy.