from less to greater, as to overpower his computing faculty, he may be
reminded that this account of his wealth is, in truth, that of many other
men's poverty. And if, while these benefits are coming so numerously in
his sight, like an irregular crowd of loaded fruit-trees, one partially
seen behind the offered luxury of another, and others still descried,
through intervals, in the distance, he can imagine them all devastated and
swept away from him, leaving him in a scene of mental desolation,--and if
he shall then consider that nearly such is the state of the great
multitude,--he will surely feel that a deep compassion is due to so
depressed a condition of existence. And how strongly is its infelicity
shown by the very circumstance, that a being who is himself but very
imperfectly enlightened, and who is exposed to sorrow and doomed to death,
is nevertheless in a state to be able to look down upon the victims of the
"lack of knowledge" with profound commiseration. The degree of pity is the
measure of a conscious superiority.

We may say to persons so favored,--If knowledge has been made the cause
that you are, beyond all comparison, better qualified to make the short
sojourn on this earth to the greatest advantage, think what a fatal thing
that must be which condemns so many, whose lot is contemporary and in
vicinity with yours to pass through the most precious possibilities of
good unprofited, and at last to look back on life as a lost adventure. If
through knowledge you have been introduced into a new and superior world
of ideas and realities, and your intellectual being has there been brought
into exercise among the highest interests, and into communication with the
noblest objects, think of that condition of the soul to which this better
economy has no existence. If knowledge rendered efficacious has become, in
your minds, the light and joy of the Christian faith and hope, look at the
state of those, whose minds have never been cultivated to an ability to
entertain the principles of religious truth, even as mere intellectual