Mark 14:7 For you have the poor with you always, and whenever you will you may do them good: but me you have not always. When the deacon, St. Lawrence, was asked, in the Decian persecution, to show the prefect the most precious treasures of the Church at Rome, he showed him the sick, the lame, the blind. "It is incredible," said Lucian, the pagan jeerer and sceptic, "to see the ardour with which those Christians help each other in their wants. They spare nothing. Their first legislator has put it into their heads that they are all brothers." "These Galileans," said Julian the apostate, "nourish not only their own poor, but ours as well." In the year 252 a plague raged in Carthage. The heathen threw out their dead and sick upon the streets, and ran away from them for fear of contagion, and cursed the Christians. St. , on the contrary, assembled his congregation, told them to love those who cursed them; and the rich working with their money, the poor with their hands, never rested till the dead were buried, the sick cared for, and the city saved from destruction. (Archdeacon F. W. Farrar.) Parallel Verses KJV: For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always. |
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