Spirit of Chambers's Journal : $b Original tales, essays, and sketches, selected from that work — John Shaqi
Spirit of Chambers's Journal : $b Original tales, essays, and sketches, selected from that workChambers, Robert
General
Spirit of Chambers's Journal : $b Original tales, essays, and sketches, selected from that work
Chambers, Robert
English literature -- Scottish authors
interchange sympathies with these persons as freely and cordially as
with any of our own class. Perhaps they are of an inferior order; but
they are only inferior in certain circumstances, which should never
interpose to prevent the flow of feeling for our kind. The great common
features of human nature remain; and let us never forget how much
respect is due to the very impress of humanity—the type of the divine
nature itself! Even where our fellow creatures are degraded by vice and
poverty, let us still be gentle in our judging. The various fortunes
which we every day see befalling the members of a single family, after
they part off in their several paths through life, teach us that it is
not to every one that success in the career of existence is destined.
Besides, do not the arrangements of society at once necessitate the
subjection of an immense multitude to humble toil, and give rise to
temptations, before which the weak and uninstructed can scarcely escape
falling? But even beneath the soiled face of the poor artizan, there
may be aspirations after some vague excellence, which hard fate has
denied him the means of attaining, though the very wish to obtain it is
itself ennobling. The very mendicant was not always so; he, too, has
had his undegraded and happier days, upon the recollection of which,
some remnant of better feeling may still repose.
These, I humbly think, are reasons why we should not look with coldness
upon any masses of men with whom it may be our lot to mingle. It is the
nature of a good man to conclude that others are like himself; and if
we take the crowd promiscuously, we can never be far wrong in thinking
that there are worthy and well-directed feelings in it as well as in
our own bosoms.
A TALE OF THE FORTY-FIVE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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