God visits the sins of the
fathers upon the children, and landlords ought to be fathers to their
tenants, and must become fathers to them some day, and that soon,
unless they intend that the Lord should visit on them all their sins,
and their forefathers' also, even unto the third and fourth
generation.
For do not fancy that because the innocent suffer with the guilty
that therefore the guilty escape. Seldom do they escape in this
world, and in the world to come never. The landlord who, as too many
do, neglects his cottages till they become man-sties, to breed
pauperism and disease--the parents whose carelessness and dirt poison
their children and neighbours into typhus and cholera--their
brother's blood will cry against them out of the ground. It will be
required at their hands sooner or later, by Him who beholds iniquity
and wrong, and who will not be satisfied in the day of His vengeance
by Cain's old answer, "Am I my brother's keeper?"
We are every one of us our brother's keeper; and if we do not choose
to confess that, God will prove it to us in a way that we cannot
mistake. A wise man tells a story of a poor Irish widow who came to
Liverpool and no one would take her in or have mercy on her, till,
from starvation and bad lodging, as the doctor said, she caught
typhus fever, and not only died herself, but gave the infection to
the whole street, and seventeen persons died of it.
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