without becoming efficacious.  One day all is changed, and the foundations of slavery begin to shake.  At that memorable epoch you will meet with a written document, the first in which is shown in its germ the great social fact which was about to have birth.  It is not an emperor’s decree, it is not the vote of a body politic, it is a letter a few lines long written by a prisoner to one of his friends.  The substance of this letter was:  “I send thee back thy slave; but in the name of God I beg of thee to receive him as thy brother; think of the common Master who is in heaven.”  This letter was addressed—­“To Philemon;” the name of the writer was Paul.  It is the first charter of slave emancipation.  Ponder this fact, Gentlemen:  contemplate the ancient institution of slavery shaken to its foundations, without being the object of any direct attack, by the breath of a new spirit.  You will then understand how historians can tell us that the relations of states, belligerent rights, civil laws, political institutions, all these things of which the Gospel has never spoken, have been, 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: