Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/98

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"The destruction of the poor is their poverty." — x. 15.

Sunday something was said of riches. To-day 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, tho 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 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 tho energy which accumulates money, and secondly through the money itself. Then there is a body of men. who are comfortable. This class comprises tho 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