240

THE RELATIVE DUTIES OF MANKIND. [Pakt III.

rious persons and families, suffering (laboring) under discourage-ment, depression, and misfortune, are often highly useful. Bysudden or gradual fluctuations of business, by losses in commerceand manufactures, by seasons unfavorable to agriculture, by de-privation of health, by the fraud or other misconduct of personswho prove themselves unworthy of confidence, by fires, tem-pests, and inundations, the calamities of war, and the thousandother unforeseen contingences against which no prudence orforesight can guard, many meritorious individuals and families, inevery community, are occasionally, without any fault of theirs,suddenly reduced to the most humiliating and distressed circum-stances, who have all the feelings, habits, and associations of in-dependence, of comfort, and perhaps of affluence.

Few situations are more trying and distressing than this. Itnot only appeals strongly to the sensibilities and personal en-deavours of the friends of such individuals and families in theirbehalf, —fit does much more ; at times, especially, it appeals tothem for aid still more substantial , for loans or even benefactionsof money. These are the proper occasions, on which men ofwealth, and all persons in easy circumstances, may do good, byunclenching the right hand without letting the left hand knowwhat the right hand is doing.* A benefaction may appropriatelybe bestowed in such cases, “ not to be seen of men," but se-cretly, the open and manifest reward of which is specially prom-ised by the Almighty.f

4. Alms dispensed through the intervention of hospitals,almshouses, infirmaries, asylums, and charitable societies of va-rious kinds. On the first four of these means of administeringalms, it is not necessary to enlarge. It does not appear, thatprevious to the introduction of Christianity, any similar means ofrelieving the poor and distressed had been provided in any coun-try.:]: They are, therefore among the most precious fruits ofChristianity, and an imperishable honor to this divine religion.In these institutions, the suffering poor, the maimed, the halt,and the blind, the distressed and unfortunate of every class, whohave none else to care for them, find a refuge, and are cared for.

* Matt. vi. 3. t Matt. vi. 1, 4.

t Paley’s Moral and Political Philosophy; p 142.