ning to attend to this special work of removing the causes of crime, and restoring at least the young offenders.

However, the greater portion of this work is not special and for the criminal, but general and for society. To change the treatment of criminals, we must change every thing else. The dangerous class is the unavoidable result of our present civilization; of our present ideas of man and social life. To reform and elevate the class of criminals, we must reform and elevate all other classes. To do that, we

must educate and refine men.

treat all men as brothers.

We must learn to This is a great work and

one of slow achievement. It cannot be brought about by legislation, nor any mechanical contrivance and reörganization alone. There is no remedy for this evil and its kindred but keeping the laws of God; in one word, none but Christianity, goodness, and piety felt in the heart, applied in all the works of life, individually, socially, and politically. While educated and abounding men acknowledge no rule of conduct but self-interest, what can you expect of the ignorant and the perishing? While great men say without rebuke that we do not look at "the natural justice of a war," do you expect men in the lowest places of society, ignorant and brutish, pinched by want, to look at the natural justice of theft, of murder? It were a vain expectation. We must improve all classes to improve one; perhaps the

332 A SERMON OF THE DANGEROUS CLASSES.

highest first. Different men acting in the most various directions, without concert, often jealous one of another, and all partial in their aims, are helping forward this universal result. While we are contending against slavery, war, intemperance, or party rage, while we are building up hospitals, colleges, schools, while we are contending for freedom of conscience, or teaching abstractly the love of man and love of God, we are all working for the welfare of this neglected class. The gallows of the barbarian and the Gospel of Christianity cannot exist together. The times are full of promise. Mankind slowly fulfils what a man of genius prophesies; God grants what a good man asks, and when it comes, it is better than what he prayed for.

IX.

A SERMON OF POVERTY. - PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY,

JANUARY 14, 1849.

PROVERBS X. 15.

The destruction of the poor is their poverty.

LAST Sunday something was said of riches. Today I ask your attention to a sermon of poverty. By poverty, I mean the state in which a man does not have enough to satisfy the natural wants of food, raiment, shelter, warmth and the like. From the earliest times that we know of, there have been two classes of men, the rich who had more than enough, the poor who had less. In one of the earliest books which treats of the condition of men, we find that Abraham, a rich man, owns the bodies of three hundred men that are poor. In four thousand years, the difference between rich and poor in our part of America is a good deal lessened, not done away with. In New England property is more uniformly distributed

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than in most countries, perhaps more equally than in any land as highly civilized. But even here the old distinction remains in a painful form and extended to a pitiful degree.

At one extreme of society is a body called the rich, men who have abundance, not a very numerous body, but powerful, first through the energy which accumulates money, and secondly, through the money itself. Then there is a body of men who are comfortable. This class comprises the mass of the people in all the callings of life. Out of this class the rich men come, and into it their children or grandchildren commonly return. Few of the rich men of Boston were sons of rich men; still fewer grandsons; few of them perhaps will be fathers of men equally rich; still fewer grandfathers of such. Then there is the class that is miserable. Some of them are supported by public charity, some by private, some of them by their toil alone - but altogether they form a mass of men who only stay in the world, and do not live in the best sense of that word.

Such are the great divisions of society in respect to property. However, the lines between these three classes are not sharp and distinctly drawn. There are no sharp divisions in nature; but for our convenience, we distinguish classes by their centre where they are most unlike, and not by their circumference where they intermix and resemble each other. The

line between the miserable and comfortable, between the comfortable and rich, is not distinctly drawn. The centre of each class is obvious enough while the limits thereof are a dissolving view.

The poor are miserable. Their food is the least that will sustain nature, not agreeable, not healthy; their clothing scanty and mean, their dwellings inconvenient and uncomfortable, with roof and walls that let in the cold and the rain-dwellings that are painful and unhealthy; in their personal habits they are commonly unclean. Then they are ignorant; they have no time to attend school in childhood, no time to read or to think in manhood, even if they have learned to do either before that. If they have the time, few men can think to any profit while the body is uncomfortable. The cold man thinks only of the cold; the wretched of his misery. Besides this they are frequently vicious. I do not mean to say they are wicked in the sight of God. I never see a poor man carried to jail for some petty crime, or even for a great one, without thinking that probably, in God's eye, the man is far better than I am, and from the State's prison or scaffold, will ascend into heaven and take rank a great ways before me. I do not mean to say they are wicked before God; but it is they who commit the minor crimes, against decency, sobriety, against property and person, and most of the major crimes, against human life. I mean that they commit the crimes that get punished by