and are being still,
every day transformed by the slow action of the Gospel. God has
appeared; justice is marching in His train.

Justice is the foundation of society; but without the spirit of love,
justice remains crippled, and never reaches its perfection. Justice
maintains the rights of each; love seeks to realize the communication of
advantages among all. Justice overthrows the artificial barriers raised
between men by force and guile; love softens natural inequalities and
causes them to turn to the general good. Need I tell you that the
knowledge of God is a light of which the brightest ray is love to men?
Benevolence, that feeling natural to our hearts, is strengthened,
extended, transfigured, by becoming charity;--charity, that union of
the soul with the Heavenly Father, which descends again to earth in
loving communion between all His children. The soul separated from God
may be conscious of strong affections: but study well the character of a
virtue which is nourished from purely human sources; you will see that
it may for the most part be expressed in these terms--"To love one's
friends heartily, and to hate one's enemies with a generous hatred; to
esteem the honest and to despise the vicious." But that virtue which
loves the vicious while it hates the vice, that virtue which will avenge
itself only by overcoming evil with good, that virtue which, while it
draws closer the bonds of private affections, makes a friend of every
man, that virtue which we call divine, by a natural impulse of our
heart--what is the source from which it flows? The following fact will
sufficiently answer the question. On the facade of one the hospitals of
the Christian world, are read these Latin words, the brief energy of
which our language cannot render: _Deo in pauperibus_, "This edifice is
consecrated to God in the person of the poor." Here is the secret of
charity: it discerns the Divine image deposited in every human soul.
But do not mistake here: we cannot love, with a love natural and direct,
the rags of squalid poverty, the brands of vice, the languors and sores
of sickness; but let God manifest Himself, and our eyes are opened. The
beauty of souls breaks forth to our view beneath the wasting of the
haggard frame, and from under the filth of vice. We love those immortal
creatures fallen and degraded; a sacred desire possesses us to restore
them to their true destination. Has an artist discovered in a mass of
rubbish, under v