For do not fancy that because the innocent suffer with the guilty that therefore the guilty escape. Seldom do they escape in this world, and in the world to come never. The landlord who, as too many do, neglects his cottages till they become man-sties, to breed pauperism and disease—the parents whose carelessness and dirt poison their children and neighbours into typhus and cholera—their brother’s blood will cry against them out of the ground. It will be required at their hands sooner or later, by Him who beholds iniquity and wrong, and who will not be satisfied in the day of His vengeance by Cain’s old answer, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” We are every one of us our brother’s keeper; and if we do not choose to confess that, God will prove it to us in a way that we cannot mistake. A wise man tells a story of a poor Irish widow who came to Liverpool and no one would take her in or have mercy on her, till, from starvation and bad lodging, as the doctor said, she caught typhus fever, and not only died herself, but gave the infection to the whole street, and seventeen persons died of it. “See,” says the wise man, “the poor Irish widow was the Liverpool people’s sister after all. She was of the same flesh and blood as they. The fever that killed her killed them, but they would not confess that they were her brothers. They shut their doors upon her, and so there was no way left for her to prove her relationship, but by killing seventeen of them with fever.” A grim jest that, but a true one, like Elijah’s jest to the Baal priests on Carmel. A true one, I say, and one that we have all need to lay to heart.