Page:The religious instruction of the colored population.djvu/8

 I shall now call your attention. First, to the enquiry. Who are among us "the poor"? Then. Secondly, I shall endeavor to shew you that Our poor have not the gospel preached to them. And, Thirdly, I shall produce some Reasons why we should awake and rouse ourselves to the duty of seeing that the gospel he preached to our poor. I. ? The poor of this city are easily distinguishable. They are a class separated from ourselves by their color, their position in society, their relation to our families, their national origin, and their moral, intellectual and physical condition. Nowhere are the poor more distinctly marked out than our poor; and. yet, strange to say, nowhere are the poor so closely and intimately connected with the higher classes as are our poor with us. They belong to us. We, also, belong to them. They are divided out among us and mingled up with us, and we with them, in a thousand ways. They live with us—eating from the same store-houses, drinking from the same fountains, dwelling in the same enclosures, forming parts of the same families. Our mothers confide us, when infants, to their arms, and sometimes to the very milk of their breasts. Their children are, to some extent, unavoidably, the playmates of our childhood—grow up with us, under the same, roof—sometimes pass through all the changes of lite with us, and, then, cither they stand weeping by our bed-side, or else we drop a tributary tear by theirs, when death comes to close the long connection and to separate the good muster and his good servant. Such, my friends, are those whom we consider the poor of this city. There they are—behold them! See them all around you, in all these streets, in all these dwellings—a race distinct from us, yet closely united to us; brought, in God's mysterious Providence, from a foreign land, and placed under our care and made members of our households. They fill the humblest places of our state of society; theyy serve us; they give us their strength; yet, they are not more truly ours than we are truly theirs. They are our poor—our poor brethren; children of our God and Father; dear to our Saviour; to the like of whom He preached; for the like of whom He died; and to the least of whom every act of Christian compassion and kindness which we shew, He will consider as shewn also to Himself.