“The Bible rescues the cause [of benevolence] from the mischief to which a heedless or unthinking sensibility would expose it. It brings it under the cognizance of a higher faculty— a faculty of steadier operation than to be weary in well-doing, and of sturdier endurance than to give it up in disgust. It calls you to consider the poor. It makes the virtue of relieving them a matter of computation as well as of sentiment; and, in so doing, it puts you beyond the reach of the various delusions, by which you are at one time led to prefer the indulgence of pity to the substantial interest of its object; at another, are led to retire chagrined and disappointed from the scene of duty, because you have not met with the gratitude or the honesty that you laid your account with; at another, are led to expend all your anxieties upon the accommodation of time, and to overlook eternity It is the office of consideration to save you from all these fallacies.”
-Thomas Chalmers, Sermon on Psa. 41:1, “The Blessedness of Considering the Poor”
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