y cannot here start
one objection that a little consideration will not supersede. No
votaries of pleasure, ruined by extravagance and luxury, forfeit pity in
censure by imploring your assistance; no slaves of idleness, no dupes of
ambition, invite reproof for neglected concerns in soliciting your
liberality. The objects of this petition are reduced, indeed, from
affluence to penury, but the change has been wrought through the
exaltation of their souls, not through the depravity of their conduct.
Whatever may be their calls upon our tenderness, their claims, to every
thinking mind, are still higher to our admiration. Driven from house and
home, despoiled of dignities and honours, abandoned to the seas for
mercy, to chance for support, many old, some infirm, all impoverished?
with mental strength alone allowed them for coping with such an
aggregate of evil! Weigh, weigh but a moment their merits and their
sufferings, and what will not be sooner renounced than the gratification
of serving so much excellence. It is to _itself_ the liberal heart does
justice in doing justice to the oppressed; they are its own happiest
feelings which it nourishes, in nourishing the unfortunate.

By addressing myself to females, I am far from inferring that charity is
exclusively their praise; no, it is a virtue as manly as it is gentle;
it is christian, in one word, and ought therefore to be universal. But
the pressure of present need is so urgent, that the ladies who patronize
this plan are content to spread it amongst their own sex, whose
contributions, though smaller, may more conveniently be sudden, and
whose demands for wealth being less serious, may render those
contributions more general[1].

Nor are the misfortunes we would now mitigate so foreign to our
"business and bosoms" as we may lightly suppose: all Europe is involved
by the circumstances which occasioned them, and with indignation as
strong, though with sensations less acute, has watched their wonderful
progress[2].

Whatever by unbelievers may be urged in defence of what they style the
_religion of nature_, its inefficacy, even for the exclusive purposes of
morality, is now surely exposed beyond all theory or controversy: and
the _religion of God_ has received a testimony as clear of its _moral_
influence, by the atrocious acts of the Convention since it has been
cast aside, as of its _divine_, in the voluntary sacrifices offered up
at its shrine by those who still adhere