t ours have worn; that his eye knew no youth of fire--no
manhood of expectancy. Pity, help, teach him. When you see the trader,
without any pride of vocation, seeking how he can best cheat you, and
degrade himself, glance into the room behind his shop and see there his
pale wife and his thin children, and think how cheerfully he meets
that circle in the only hour he has out of the twenty-four. Pity his
narrowness of mind; his want of reliance upon the God of Good; but
remember there have been Greshams, and Heriots, and Whittingtons; and
remember, too, that in our happy land there are thousands of almshouses,
built by the men of trade alone. And when you are discontented with the
great, and murmur, repiningly, of Marvel in his garret, or Milton in his
hiding-place, turn in justice to the Good among the great. Read how John
of Lancaster loved Chaucer and sheltered Wicliff. There have been Burkes
as well as Walpoles. Russell remembered Banim's widow, and Peel forgot
not Haydn.
Once more: believe that in every class there is Good; in every man,
Good. That in the highest and most tempted, as well as in the lowest,
there is often a higher nobility than of rank. Pericles and Alexander
had great, but different virtues, and although the refinement of the
one may have resulted in effeminacy, and the hardihood of the other in
brutality, we ought to pause ere we condemn where we should all have
fallen.
Look only for the Good. It will make you welcome everywhere, and
everywhere it will make you an instrument to good. The lantern of
Diogenes is a poor guide when compared with the Light God hath set in
the heavens; a Light which shines into the solitary cottage and the
squalid alley, where the children of many vices are hourly exchanging
deeds of kindness; a Light shining into the rooms of dingy warehousemen
and thrifty clerks, whose hard labour and hoarded coins are for wife
and child and friend; shining into prison and workhouse, where sin and
sorrow glimmer with sad eyes through rusty bars into distant homes and
mourning hearths; shining through heavy curtains, and round sumptuous
tables, where the heart throbs audibly through velvet mantle and silken
vest, and where eye meets eye with affection and sympathy; shining
everywhere upon God's creatures, and with its broad beams lighting up
a virtue wherever it falls, and telling the proud, the wronged, the
merciless, or the despairing, that there is "Good in All."
HUMAN PRO
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