In doing thus, Christ represented the best spirit of the Old Testament.  The Jewish Scriptures teach mercy, the very genius of Jewish institutions was that of mercy, and especially to the poor, the weak, the helpless.  The crimes against which the prophets thundered their severest denunciations were crimes upon the helpless.  It was the avarice of the rich, it was the unbounded lust and cruelty of the strong, that were denounced by them.  They did not preach against human nature in general.  They did not preach against total depravity and the original condition of mankind.  They singled out violations of the law in the magistrate, in the king, in rich men, everywhere, and especially all those wrongs committed by power either unconsciously or with purpose, cruelty upon the helpless, the defenseless, the poor and the needy.  When Christ declared that this was his ministry, he took his text from the Old Testament; he spoke in its spirit.  It was to preach the gospel to the poor that he was sent.  He had come into the world to change the condition of mankind.  Beginning at the top?  No; beginning at the bottom and working up to the top from the bottom.

When this view of the gospel enters into our understanding and is fully comprehended by us, how exactly it fits in with the order of nature, and with the order of the unfolding of human life and human society!  It takes sides with the poor; and so the universal tendency of Providence and of history, slowly unfolded, is on the whole going from low to high, from worse to better, and from good toward the perfect.  When we consider, we see that man begins as a helpless thing, a baby zero without a figure before it; and every step in life adds a figure to it and gives it more and more worth.  On the whole, the law of unfolding throughout the world is from lower to higher; and though when applied to the population of the globe it is almost inconceivable, still, with many back-sets and reactions, the tendency of the universe is thus from lower to higher.  Why?  Let any man consider whether there is not of necessity a benevolent intelligence somewhere that is drawing up from the crude toward the ripe, from the rough toward the smooth, from bad to good, and from good through better toward best.  The tendency upward runs like a golden thread through the history of the whole world, both in the unfolding of human life and in the unfolding of the race itself.  Thus the tendency of nature is in accordance with the tendency of the gospel as declared by Jesus Christ, namely, that it is a ministry of mercy to the needy.

The vast majority of mankind have been and yet are poor.  There are ten thousand men poor where there is one man even comfortably provided for, body and soul, and hundreds of thousands where there is one rich, taking the whole world together.  The causes of poverty are worthy a moment’s consideration.  Climate and soil have much to do with it.  Men whose winter lasts nine or ten months in the year,