Look on this picture: An armed and organized mob is breaking up a political gathering of the blacks and their friends, and in the background are the overawed Freedmen retiring from the polls. Look, also, on this picture: A company of United States soldiers are keeping guard over a body of legislators, mostly black, who, with reckless rascality, are squandering the public funds, to the ruin of the State and the disgrace of the nation. Turn not from these pictures with indifference, for they are no fancy sketches; nay, face them, for the history of at least two States of this Union is liable to be a perpetual oscillation between the two. But now look on this picture: A colored man is tilling his land, adorning his home, and gathering around him the refinements of life. Near by is the school-house, where his children, with hundreds of others, are receiving the instruction of skilful teachers, and not far off is the church edifice where that man and his neighbors worship God under the ministration of a well educated and pious minister. Which picture do we choose, not as a matter of artistic preference, but as the practical model for patriotic work? The only safety is to extend that last picture till it shall cover the whole canvas and blot out the other two. In that way only can a life and death struggle between two irreconcilable forces be avoided. * * * * * “THESE MY BRETHREN.” In the Saviour’s great “Inasmuch” there is the power of personality. “I was an hungered; I was thirsty; I was naked; I was a stranger; I was sick; I was in prison.” It was Christ in the person of these suffering and lowly ones; and service done to them was done to Him. He might well have stopped there. But the marvel of His personal identification with them is in the relationship which He claims between Himself and them—“_these my brethren_.” Oh, the touching condescension to name them by this title! What we do for these humble and desolate ones we are not only doing for our Lord, but for the brethren of our Lord. He takes it as a special favor to Himself. And this service is graduated to the lowest capacity—it is service done to only _one_ of the _least_ of these. The standard is not that we should serve the mass of these His brethren, but any one of them, according to the measure of our ability, even down to a single act done to one of them in the right spirit and as a revelation of a character in which we delight. Then the obligation runs up to as great a number as our opportunity and our ability may reach.