Church of England -- Sermons; Sermons, English -- 19th century
tempter, and the sinner is his own executioner: he lies in wait for
his own life (says Solomon) when he lies in wait for his brother's.
Do you see the same law working in our own free country? If you
leave the poor careless and filthy, you can obtain no good servants:
if you leave them profligate, they make your sons profligate also:
if you leave them tempted by want, your property is unsafe: if you
leave them uneducated, reckless, improvident, you cannot get your
work properly done, and have to waste time and money in watching
your workmen instead of trusting them. Why, what are all poor-rates
and county-rates, if you will consider, but God's plain proof to us,
that the poor are members of the same body as ourselves; and that if
we will not help them of our own free will, we shall find it
necessary to help them against our will: that if we will not pay a
little to prevent them becoming pauperized or criminal, we must pay
a great deal to keep them when they have become so? We may draw a
lesson--and a most instructive one it is--from the city of
Liverpool, in which it was lately proved that crime--and especially
the crime of uneducated boys and girls--had cost, in the last few
years, the city many times more than it would cost to educate,
civilize, and depauperize the whole rising generation of that city,
and had been a tax upon the capital and industry of Liverpool, so
enormous that they would have submitted to it from no Government on
earth; and yet they had been blindly inflicting it upon themselves
for years, simply because they chose to forget that they were their
brothers' keepers.
Look again at preventible epidemics, like cholera. All the great
towns of England have discovered, what you I fear are discovering
also, that the expense of a pestilence, and of the widows and
orphans which it creates, is far greater than the expense of putting
a town into such a state of cleanliness as would defy the entrance
of the disease. So it is throughout the world. Nothing is more
expensive than penuriousness; nothing more anxious than
carelessness; and every duty which is bidden to wait, returns with
seven fresh duties at its back.
Yes, my friends, we are members of a body; and we must realize that
fact by painful experience, if we refuse to realize it in public
spirit and brotherly kindness, and the approval of a good
conscience, and the knowledge that we are living like our Lord and
Master Jesus Christ, who laboured for all but Himself, cared for all
but Himself; who counted not His own life dear to Himself that by
laying it down He might redeem into His own likeness the beings whom
He had made; and who has placed us on this earth, each in his own
station, each in his own parish, that we might follow in His
footsteps, and live by His Spirit, which is the spirit of love and
fellow-feeling, that new and risen life of His, which is the life of
duty, honour, and self-sacrifice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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