mebody: otherwise it
cannot long remain tender or beautiful.

[Sidenote: Its mythical supports.]

Charity is seldom found uncoloured by fables which illustrate it and
lend it a motive by which it can justify itself verbally.
Metempsychosis, heaven and hell, Christ's suffering for every sinner,
are notions by which charity has often been guided and warmed. Like myth
everywhere, these notions express judgments which they do not originate,
although they may strengthen or distort them in giving them expression.
The same myths, in cruel hands, become goads to fanaticism. That natural
sensitiveness in which charity consists has many degrees and many
inequalities; the spirit bloweth where it listeth. Incidental
circumstances determine its phases and attachments in life. Christian
charity, for instance, has two chief parts: first, it hastens to relieve
the body; then, forgetting physical economy altogether, it proceeds to
redeem the soul. The bodily works of mercy which Christians perform with
so much tact and devotion are not such as philanthropy alone would
inspire; they are more and less than that. They are more, because they
are done with a certain disproportionate and absolute solicitude, quite
apart from ultimate benefit or a thought of the best distribution of
energies; they are also less, because they stop at healing, and cannot
pass beyond the remedial and incidental phase without ceasing to be
Christian. The poor, says Christian charity, we have always with us;
every man must be a sinner--else what obligation should he have to
repent?--and, in fine, this world is essentially the kingdom of Satan.
Charity comes only to relieve the most urgent bodily needs, and then to
wean the heart altogether from mortal interests. Thus Christianity
covers the world with hospitals and orphanages; but its only positive
labours go on in churches and convents, nor will it found schools, if
left to itself, to teach anything except religion. These offices may be
performed with more or less success, with more or less appeal to the
miraculous; but, with whatever mixture of magic and policy, Christian
charity has never aimed at anything but healing the body and saving the
soul.

[Sidenote: There is intelligence in charity.]

Christ himself, we may well feel, did not affect publicans and sinners,
ignorant people and children, in order to save them in the regimental
and prescriptive fashion adopted by the Church. He commanded those he
forg