and private prayer,-of praise and thanksgiving, and lowliest humility, that handmaid of all the Christian virtues; not only the duties of husband, and parent, and child-duties and obligations binding upon man, whatever be the sphere in which he moves,—but those precepts also which more immediately affect the temptations to which poverty is exposed-the privations and difficulties with which a lowlier station has frequently to struggle. Among these you will remind them of the exhortations to honesty in their intercourse with the world, because the temptation to transgress this commandment is stronger to them than to those in easier circumstances;-to contentment, "in whatever state they may be placed," because the condition of the poor especially calls forth the exercise of this virtue ;-to temperance, where the inducements to the opposite vice are manifold; -to industry, where there prevail so many evil promoters of idleness, the parent of every crime ; to patience, and fortitude, and resignation;-to perseverance in well-doing, under every infliction of adversity;-and to a firm reliance upon the assurances of a happier reversion, far more than proportionate to the scantiness of their present provision. The issues of your labours will be thisyou will have fixed a strong impression on the minds of your hearers that there is a promise of future recompense for present privation,—that the Gospel contains that promise, and that it is in this later day, faithfully held forth to the poor,that, if there be an unequal distribution of ministerial watchfulness by the present teachers of Christianity it is partial only to the greater necessities of the poor. Ever yours, &c. LETTER V. PRIVATE COMMUNION. MY DEAR THERE is a duty most intimately connected with your visits to the poor to which I particularly call your attention, namely, the private administration of the Holy Communion.* You will unhappily find (and I believe it is more or less the prevailing error of every parish in the kingdom) a reluctance on the part of the poor to receive the Sacrament, until their lives have * On this and some other subjects considered in these letters, the Author has purposely limited his observations, to avoid the repetition of what he has already explained in other publications. |