t
if, from the remotest period of human annals, and in all the numberless
experiments of government which the wit of man has devised, still this
inequality is ever found to exist, may we not suspect that there is
something in the very principles of our nature to which that inequality
is necessary and essential? Ask why this inequality! Why? as well ask
why life is the sphere of duty and the nursery of virtues. For if all
men were equal, if there were no suffering and no ease, no poverty and
no wealth, would you not sweep with one blow the half at least of human
virtues from the world? If there were no penury and no pain, what would
become of fortitude?--what of patience?--what of resignation? If there
were no greatness and no wealth, what would become of benevolence, of
charity, of the blessed human pity, of temperance in the midst of
luxury, of justice in the exercise of power? Carry the question further;
grant all conditions the same--no reverse, no rise and no fall--nothing
to hope for, nothing to fear--what a moral death you would at once
inflict upon all the energies of the soul, and what a link between the
heart of man and the Providence of God would be snapped asunder! If we
could annihilate evil, we should annihilate hope; and hope, my brethren,
is the avenue to faith. If there be 'a time to weep, and a time to
laugh,' it is that he who mourns may turn to eternity for comfort, and
he who rejoices may bless God for the happy hour. Ah! my brethren, were
it possible to annihilate the inequalities of human life, it would be
the banishment of our worthiest virtues, the torpor of our spiritual
natures, the palsy of our mental faculties. The moral world, like the
world without us, derives its health and its beauty from diversity and
contrast.

"'Every man shall bear his own burden.' True; but now turn to an earlier
verse in the same chapter. 'Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil
the law of Christ.' Yes; while Heaven ordains to each his peculiar
suffering, it connects the family of man into one household, by that
feeling which, more perhaps than any other, distinguishes us from the
brute creation--I mean the feeling to which we give the name of
_sympathy_--the feeling for each other! The herd of deer shun the stag
that is marked by the gunner; the flock heedeth not the sheep that
creeps into the shade to die; but man has sorrow and joy not in himself
alone, but in the joy and sorrow of those around him. He who f