Though the old
philosophers, historians, and poets, frequently inculcated benevolence, we
have no reason to conclude from any facts they have left us, that persons
in their days did any thing more than occasionally relieve an unfortunate
object, who might present himself before them, or that, however they might
deplore the existence of public evils among them, they joined in
associations for their suppression, or that they carried their charity, as
bodies of men, into other kingdoms. To Christianity alone we are indebted
for the new and sublime spectacle of seeing men going beyond the bounds of
individual usefulness to each other--of seeing them associate for the
extirpation of private and public misery--and of seeing them carry their
charity, as a united brotherhood, into distant lands. And in this wider
field of benevolence it would be unjust not to confess, that no country has
shone with more true lustre than our own, there being scarcely any case of
acknowledged affliction for which some of her Christian children have not
united in an attempt to provide relief.
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