Sweet Essence

"Sympathy. - to touch the hearts of men is needed too. Some men have courage, perseverance, and zeal, but their hearts are as cold as an icicle. Christ might have been born in a palace had He chosen, but poor men would have said He had not come for them; but He was born in a manger, lower than their own rank of life. The minister who speaks to people as if he were separate from them, that tells them what they should do, this and that, will not carry them with him. To speak to men from a higher platform is not the way to do them good. It should be what we do, - we poor sinners, and you. The milk of human kindness is a great element in bringing souls to Christ.

We have, in Chicago, a meeting for strangers; and it is most blessed. Every Monday night, seventy-five a hundred young men newly arrived in the city, assemble to find friends. A young man coming from the country to a situation, or to college in town, feels very lonely. He walks the street, and has no one, of all the crowds, to speak to him, and he is miserable. That is the time when his heart is softest; then, if any one speaks to him or shows him acts of kindness, he never forgets it. The devil watches for friendless youths like those; and the ensnaring paths of vice seem refuges from loneliness. Such a young man, walking along the street, sees a big brown paper pasted on a boarding, or at a railway station, or somewhere else, having painted on it, "Strangers' Meeting to-night. All strangers invited to attend." So he goes, and meets a kind look and words of friendship, and it is better to him than anything in the world.

During our [civil] war, there was a Southern man who came over to a Wisconsin regiment, saying he could not fight to uphold slavery. Some time after, the mail from the north came in, and all the men got letters from their relations, and universal joy prevailed. This Southern man said he wished he were dead; he was most unhappy, for there were no letters for him. His mother was dead, and his father and brothers would have shot him if they could, for going against them. This man's tent-mate was very sorry for his friend, and when he wrote to his mother in Wisconsin, he just told her all about it. His mother sat down and wrote to her son's friend. She called him her son, and spoke to him like a mother. She told him, when the war was over that he must come to her, and that her home would be his. When the letter reached the regiment, the chaplain took it down to where this man was standing, and told him it was for him; but he said it was a mistake, that nobody would write to him; he had no friends, it must be for someone else. He was persuaded to open it, and when he read it, he felt such joy. He went down the lines, saying, "I've got a mother!" When afterwards the regiment was disbanded, and the men were returning to their homes, there was none who showed so much anxiety as this man to get to his mother in Wisconsin.

There are hundreds of young men who want mothers, and any kindness done to them will not lose its reward."

Dwight Moody 

As I read this tears fell for the sake of knowing our country has grown cold and distant from showing kindness to complete strangers without respect to what they would gain.