hardness of heart toward them, which multiply the number of the unfortunate: excuse no more then, on that head, the failing of your charities; that would be making your guilt itself your excuse. Ah! you complain that the poor overburden you; but they would have reason in retorting the charge one day against you: do not then accuse them for your insensibility: and reproach them not with that, which they undoubtedly shall one day reproach to you before the tribunal of Jesus Christ.
If each of you were, according to the advice of the apostle, to appropriate a certain portion of your wealth toward the subsistence of the poor; if, in the computation of your expenses and of your revenues, this article were to be always regarded as the most sacred and the most inviolable one, then should we quickly see the number of the afflicted to diminish: we should soon see renewed in the church that peace, that happiness, and that cheerful equality which reigned among the first Christians: we should no longer behold with sorrow that monstrous disproportion, which, elevating the one, places him on the pinnacle of prosperity and opulence, while the other crawls on the ground, and groans in the gulf of poverty and affliction: no longer should there be any unhappy except the impious among us; no secret miseries except those which sin operates in the soul; no tears except those of penitence; no sighs but for heaven; no poor, but those blessed disciples of the gospel, who renounce all to follow their master. Our cities would be the abode of innocence and compassion; religion, a commerce of charity; the earth the image of heaven, where, in different degrees of glory, each is equally happy; and the enemies of faith would again, as formerly, be forced to render glory to God, and to confess that there is something of divine in a religion which is capable of uniting men together in a manner so new.
But, in what the error here consists, is, that, in the practice, nobody considers charity as one of the most essential obligations of Christianity; consequently, they have no regulation on that point; if some bounty be bestowed, it is always arbitrary; and, however small it may be, they are equally satisfied with themselves, as if they had even gone beyond their duty.
Besides, when you pretend to excuse the scantiness of your charities, by saying that the number of the poor is endless; what do you believe to say? You say that your obligations, with respect to them, are become only more indispensable; that your compassion ought to increase in proportion as their wants increase; and that you contract new debts whenever any increase of the unfortunate takes place on the earth. It is then, my brethren, it is during these public calamities that you ought to retrench even from expenses which at any other period might be permitted, and which might even be proper; it is then that you ought to consider yourselves but as the principal poor, and to take as a charity whatever you take for yourselves; it is then that you are no longer either grandee, man in office, distinguished citizen, or woman of illustrious birth; you are simply believer, member of Jesus Christ, brother of every afflicted Christian.
