seeing Him as He is morally, and of seeing in Him the full perfection
of all that attracts your moral sense, when it is manifested in any human
being. And you can love your neighbour as yourselves, because, and in as
far as you have in you the Spirit of God, the spirit of universal love,
which proceedeth out for ever both from the Father and the Son to all
beings and things which They have made.

And of one thing I am sure, that in proportion as you are led and
inspired by that Spirit of God which showed in our Lord, in the very
deepest and truest sense, as the spirit of humanity, just so you will
feel a genial and hearty pleasure in lessening all human suffering,
however slight; in increasing all harmless human pleasure, however
transitory; and in copying Him who, at the marriage feast, gracefully and
graciously turned the water into wine. I do not, of course, mean that
you are to do no more than that; to prefer sentiment to duty, to amuse
and glorify yourselves by paying tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, and
neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.
But I do mean that you are not to distrust your own sentiments, not to
crush your own instinctive sympathies. The very lowest of them--that
which makes you shrink at the sight of pain, and rejoice in the sight of
pleasure, is not natural, and common to you with the animals; it is
supernatural and divine. It is a schoolmaster to bring you to Christ, to
that higher inspiration of His, which tells your heart to alleviate the
unseen woes which will never come into painful contact with your
sensibilities, to bestow pleasures in which you yourself have no
immediate share. It will tell your hearts especially in the case of this
very Hospital for Consumption not to be slack in giving, because so much
of what you will give--it is painful to recollect how much--will be
spent, not in prevention, not even in cure, but in mere alleviation, mere
increased bodily ease, mere savoury food, even mere passing amusements
for wearied minds. Be it so. If (which God forbid) we could do nothing
SAVE alleviate; if (which God forbid) permanent cure, even lengthening of
life, were impossible, I should say just as much, Give. Give money to
alleviate; give, even though what you give were, in the strictly economic
sense, WASTED. We are ready enough, most of us, to waste upon ourselves.
It is well for us to taste once in a way the lu