Page:A charge delivered at the ordinary visitation of the archdeaconry of Chichester in July, 1843.djvu/39

35 learn the rudiments of our obligations in this respect that public grants are to be deprecated. The duties which inhere in the blessing of Church-membership, and the responsibilities which wait upon the possession of worldly rank or wealth, are regaining their lost ascendency in the conscience of England. Most mischievous would be any measure which should throw back this reviving sense of duty; most pernicious to the very life of the Church, if we were again drawn off from our own energies and self-denying efforts, to rest upon grants from societies and from Parliament. The work of church-extension, as it is called, is a duty attaching locally to every lord of the soil, to every possessor of wealth, to every holder of land, to every employer of labour. Whatsoever invests any man with a beneficial interest in the labour of his fellow-men, binds him to take a paternal care for them as members of Christ. It is a high sin in the sight of Heaven for a man to wring his wealth out of the thews and sinews of his fellows, and to think that, when he has paid them their wages, he has paid them all he owes. He owes them a care as broad as the humanity of which he and they alike partake: as he shall answer at the day of judgment, he may not dare to deal with them as less than members of the body of Christ. The dense masses of our manufacturing towns, the poor families of our agricultural villages, are each one of them related, by the bond of labour and wages,