Pity, as I have said somewhere else, is the most amiable of all our passions, and there are not many occasions, on which we ought to conquer or curb it. A surgeon may be as compassionate as he pleases, so it does not make him omit or forbear to perform what he ought to do. Judges likewise, and juries, may be influenced with pity, if they take care that plain laws and justice itself are not infringed, and do not suffer by it. No pity does more mischief in the world, than what is excited by the tenderness of parents, and hinders them from managing their children, as their rational love to them would require, and themselves could wish it. The sway likewise which this passion bears in the affections of women, is more considerable than is commonly imagined, and they daily commit faults that are altogether ascribed to lust, and yet are in a great measure owing to pity. What I named last is not the only passion that mocks and resembles charity; pride and vanity have built more hospitals than all the virtues together. Men are so tenacious of their possessions, and selfishness is so riveted in our nature, that whoever can but any ways conquer it shall have the applause of the public, and all the encouragement imaginable to conceal his frailty, and sooth any other appetite he shall have a mind to indulge. The man that supplies, with his private fortune, what the whole must otherwise have provided for, obliges every member of the society, and, therefore, all the world are ready to pay him their acknowledgment, and think themselves in duty bound to pronounce all such actions virtuous, without examining, or so much as looking into the motives from which they were performed. Nothing is more destructive to virtue or religion itself, than to make men believe, that giving money to the poor, though they should not part with it till after death, will make a full atonement in the next world, for the sins they have committed in this. A villain, who has been guilty of a barbarous murder, may, by the help of false witnesses, escape the punishment he deserved: he prospers, we will say, heaps up great wealth, and, by the advice of his father confessor, leaves all his estate to a monastery, and his children beggars. What fine amends has this good Christian made for his crime, and what an honest man was the priest who directed his conscience? He who parts with all he has in his life-time, whatever principle he acts from, only gives away what was his own; but the rich miser who refuses to assist his nearest relations while he is alive, though they never designedly disobliged him, and disposes of his money, for what we call charitable uses, after his death, may imagine of his goodness what he pleases, but he robs his posterity. I am now thinking of a late instance of charity, a prodigious gift, that has made a great noise in the world: I have a mind to set it in the light I think it deserves, and beg leave, for once, to please pedants, to treat it somewhat rhetorically.