press in the hands of highly educated
men, in independent position, and of honest purpose, may, indeed,
become all that it has been hitherto vainly vaunted to be. Its editor
will, therefore, I doubt not, pardon me, in that, by very reason of my
respect for the journal, I do not let pass unnoticed an article in its
third number, page 5, which was wrong in every word of it, with the
intense wrongness which only an honest man can achieve who has taken a
false turn of thought in the outset, and is following it, regardless of
consequences. It contained at the end this notable passage:--

"The bread of affliction, and the water of affliction--aye, and the
bedsteads and blankets of affliction, are the very utmost that the law
ought to give to _outcasts merely as outcasts_." I merely put beside
this expression of the gentlemanly mind of England in 1865, a part of
the message which Isaiah was ordered to "lift up his voice like a
trumpet" in declaring to the gentlemen of his day: "Ye fast for strife,
and to smite with the fist of wickedness. Is not this the fast that I
have chosen, to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the
poor _that are cast out_ (margin 'afflicted') to _thy_ house." The
falsehood on which the writer had mentally founded himself, as
previously stated by him, was this: "To confound the functions of the
dispensers of the poor-rates with those of the dispensers of a
charitable institution is a great and pernicious error." This sentence
is so accurately and exquisitely wrong, that its substance must be thus
reversed in our minds before we can deal with any existing problem of
national distress. "To understand that the dispensers of the
poor-rates are the almoners of the nation, and should distribute its
alms with a gentleness and freedom of hand as much greater and franker
than that possible to individual charity, as the collective national
wisdom and power may be supposed greater than those of any single
person, is the foundation of all law respecting pauperism." (Since
this was written the "Pall Mall Gazette" has become a mere party
paper--like the rest; but it writes well, and does more good than
mischief on the whole.)

[18] The great renunciation.

SESAME AND LILIES

LECTURE--II--LILIES[1]

OF QUEENS' GARDENS.

"Be thou glad, oh thirsting Desert; let the desert be made cheerful,
and bloom as the lily; and the barren places of Jordan shall run wild
with wood."--ISAIAH xxxv,