What a pattern to His people, the tender _compassion_ of Jesus! He found the world He came to save a moral Bethesda. The wail of suffering humanity was every where borne to His ear. It was His delight to walk its porches, to pity, relieve, comfort, save! The faintest cry of misery arrested His footsteps--stirred a ripple in this fountain of Infinite Love. Was it a _leper_,--that dreaded name which entailed a life-long exile from friendly looks and kindly words? There was _One_, at least, who had tones and deeds of tenderness for the outcast. "_Jesus_, being moved with compassion, put forth His hand, and _touched_ him." Was it some blind beggars on the Jericho highway, groping in darkness, pleading for help? "_Jesus_ stood still, and had compassion on them, and touched their eyes!" Was it the speechless pleadings of a widow's tears at the gate of Nain, when she followed her earthly pride and prop to the grave? "When the _Lord_ saw her, He had compassion on her, and said, Weep not!" Even when He rebukes, the bow of compassion is seen in the cloud, or rather, that cloud, as it passes, dissolves in a rain-shower of mercy. He pronounces Jerusalem "_desolate_," but the doom is uttered amid a flood of anguished sorrow! Reader! do the compassionate words and deeds of a tender Saviour find any feeble echo and transcript in yours? As you traverse in thought the wastes of human wretchedness, does the spectacle give rise, not to the mere emotional feeling which weeps itself away in sentimental tears, but to an earnest desire to _do something_ to mitigate the sufferings of woe-worn humanity? How vast and world-wide the claims on your compassion!--now near, now at a distance--the unmet and unanswered cry of perishing millions abroad--the heathendom which lies unsuccored at your own door--the public charity languishing--the mission staff dwarfed and crippled from lack of needful funds--a suffering district--a starving family--a poor neighbor--a helpless orphan--it may be, some crowded hovel, where misery and vice run riot--or some lonely sick chamber, where the dim lamp has been wasting for dreary nights--or some desolate home which death has entered, where "Joseph is not, and Simeon is not," and where some sobbing heart, under the tattered garb of poverty, mourns, unsolaced and unpitied, its "loved and lost." Are there none such within your reach, to whom a trifling pittance would be as an angel of mercy? How it would hallow and enhance all you possess, were you to seek to live as almoner of Jehovah's bounties! If He has given you of this world's substance, remember it is bestowed, not to be greedily hoarded or lavishly squandered. Property and wealth are talents to be traded on and laid out for the good of others--sacred trusts, not selfishly to be _enjoyed_, but generously to be _employed_.