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Excerpt from The Ministry for the Poor: A Discourse Delivered Before the Benevolent Fraternity of Churches in Boston, on Their Anniversary, April 9, 1835
There I see a mystery in which my faculties are lost. I see an existence, before which the duration of the world and the outward Heavens is a span. I say that I see it. I am not surrendering myself to imagination; I have a consciousness of truth, or rather a consciousness of falling beneath the truth. I feel, then, my incompetency to be just to this subject. But we must do what we can. No testimony, however feeble, if lifted up in sincerity in behalf of great principles, is ever lost. Through weak man, if sanctified by a simple, humble love of truth, a higher power than man's is pleased to work. May that power overshadow us, and work within us, and open every soul to truth.
To awaken a Spiritual interest in the poor, this is my object. I wish not to diminish your sympathy with their outward condition; I would increase it. But their physical sufferings are not their chief evils. The great calamity of the poor is not their poverty, understanding this word in the usual sense, but the tendency of their privations, and of their social rank, to degradation of mind. Give them the Christian spirit, and their lot would not be intolerable. Remove from them the misery which they bring on themselves by evildoing, and separate from their inevitable sufferings the aggravations which come from crime, and their burden would be light compared with what now oppresses them.
The outward condition of the poor is a hard one.
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