of which is One who poured out his own life-blood for the sake of those
who hated him, that men should henceforth live not for themselves, but
for Him who died and rose again, and ascended up on high and received
gifts for men, that the Lord God might dwell among them.
And because all general truths can only be verified in particular
instances, verify your general faith in that Christianity which you
profess in this particular instance, by doing the duty which lies nearest
to you, and _giving_, _as it is called_, to this hospital for which I now
plead.
Thanks to the spirit and the attainments of the average of English
medical men and chaplains, to praise the management of any hospital which
is under their care, is a needless impertinence. Do you find funds,
there will be no fear as to their being well employed; and no fear, alas!
either of their services being in full demand, while the sanitary state
of vast streets of South London, lying close to this hospital, are in a
state in which they are, and in which private cupidity and neglect seem
willing to compel them to remain. It is on account of its contiguity to
these neglected, destitute, and poisonous localities, that this hospital
seems to me especially valuable. But though situated in a part of London
where its presence is especially needed, it has not, from various causes
which have arisen from no fault of its own, attracted as much public
notice as some other more magnificent foundations; while it possesses one
feature, peculiar I believe to it, among our London hospitals, which
seems to me to render it especially deserving of support: I speak of the
ward for incurable patients, in which, instead of ending their days in
the melancholy wards of a workhouse, or amid those pestilential and
crowded dwellings which have perhaps produced their maladies, and which
certainly will aggravate them, they may have their heavy years of
hopeless suffering softened by a continued supply of constant comforts,
and constant medical solicitude, such as the best-conducted workhouse, or
the most laborious staff of parish surgeons, and district visitors, ay,
not even the benevolence and self-sacrifice of friends and relations, can
possibly provide. I beseech you, picture to yourselves the amount of
mere physical comfort, not to mention the higher blessings of spiritual
teaching and consolation, accruing to some poor tortured cripple, in the
wards of this hospital; compare it with the very brightest lot possible
for him in the dwellings of the lower, or even of the middle classes of
the metropolis; then recollect that these hospital luxuries, which would
be unattainable by him elsewhere, are but a tithe of those which you, in
his situation, would consider absolute necessaries, without which a life
of suffering, ay, even of health, were intolerable—and do unto others
this day, as you would that others should do unto you!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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