For, as one who tried to do something, she did not want to go on and say that if all who found the question interesting, would instead of talking about it do what they could, not to its solution but to its removal, they would at least make their mark on the poverty they claimed to be concerned about, of which not all the wind of words would in ten thousand years blow away the tiniest fragment. Love, and love alone, as from the first it is the source of all life, love alone, wise at once and foolish as a child, can work redemption. It is life drawing nigh to life, person to person, the human to human, that conquers death. This—therefore urges people to combine, seeking the strength of men, not the strength of God. Love alone, and the obligation thereto between the members of Christ’s body, is the one eternal unbreakable bond. It is only where love is not that law must go. Law is indeed necessary, but woe to the community where love does not cast out—where at least love is not casting out law. Not all the laws in the universe can save a man from poverty, not to say from sin, not to say from conscious misery.

Work on, ye who cannot see this. Do your best. You will be rewarded according to your honesty. You will be saved by the fire that will destroy your work, and will one day come to see that Christ’s way, and no other whatever, can either redeem your own life, or render the condition of the poorest or the richest wretch such as would justify his creation. If by the passing of this or that more or less wise law, you could, in the person of his descendant of the third or fourth generation, make a well-to-do man of him, he would probably be a good deal farther from the kingdom of heaven than the beggar or the thief over whom you now lament.

Vavasor began to think that if ever the day came when he might approach Hester “as a suitor for her hand,” he must be very careful over what he called her philanthropic craze. But if ever he should in earnest set about winning her, he had full confidence in the artillery he could bring to the siege. He had not yet made any real effort to gain her affections.

Neither had he a doubt that, having succeeded, all would be easy, and he could do with her much as he pleased. He had no anxiety concerning the philanthropic craze thereafter. His wife, once introduced to such society as would then be her right, would speedily be cured of her extravagances and enthusiasms about the poor that were to him no less than folly.