aid, he was kind to the
poor; meaning himself. The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more
esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. I once heard a
reverend lecturer on England, a man of learning and intelligence,
after enumerating her scientific, literary, and political worthies,
Shakespeare, Bacon, Cromwell, Milton, Newton, and others, speak next of
her Christian heroes, whom, as if his profession required it of him,
he elevated to a place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the
great. They were Penn, Howard, and Mrs. Fry. Every one must feel the
falsehood and cant of this. The last were not England's best men and
women; only, perhaps, her best philanthropists.

I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to
philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives
and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man's
uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves.
Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick
serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the
flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him
to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not
be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs
him nothing and of which he is unconscious. This is a charity that hides
a multitude of sins. The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with
the remembrance of his own castoff griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it
sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health
and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread
by contagion. From what southern plains comes up the voice of wailing?
Under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would send light? Who
is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? If anything ail
a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in
his bowels even--for that is the seat of sympathy--he forthwith sets
about reforming--the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers--and
it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it--that the world has
been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is
a great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the
children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his
drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimau and the Patagonian, and
embrace