“THESE MY BRETHREN.”
In the Saviour’s great “Inasmuch” there is the power of personality. “I was an hungered; I was thirsty; I was naked; I was a stranger; I was sick; I was in prison.” It was Christ in the person of these suffering and lowly ones; and service done to them was done to Him. He might well have stopped there. But the marvel of His personal identification with them is in the relationship which He claims between Himself and them—“these my brethren.” Oh, the touching condescension to name them by this title! What we do for these humble and desolate ones we are not only doing for our Lord, but for the brethren of our Lord. He takes it as a special favor to Himself. And this service is graduated to the lowest capacity—it is service done to only one of the least of these. The standard is not that we should serve the mass of these His brethren, but any one of them, according to the measure of our ability, even down to a single act done to one of them in the right spirit and as a revelation of a character in which we delight. Then the obligation runs up to as great a number as our opportunity and our ability may reach.
The intervention of organic efficiency greatly multiplies the duty and the privilege of the individual. The American Missionary Association, as has been potently said, is set for the care of the three despised races in our country. Though the Indian and the Negro and the Chinaman are the objects of prejudice and violence and injustice and hatred on the part of our people, nevertheless Christ speaks of them as among “these my brethren;” and the prayers and the sympathy, and the service and the giving of substance in their behalf He counts as rendered to Him. This organization cannot discharge any one’s personal duty, but its instrumentality is offered to all who would use it in the discharge of individual obligation to Christ and to His brethren. Its opportunities belong to all who would use them, and by these a single Christian may reach not only “unto one of the least of these,” but unto many.
At the Great Day, when the Master shall surprise you, humble Christian, with a benediction for service rendered to His brethren among these despised ones, and you deprecatingly answer, when and where, His revealing response may be—when you reached them with your prayers and your substance through that Association which offered you its means of operation. And surely all its workers among these outcast peoples, in the ostracism and opposition and hatred which confront them, may even in this life have their abundant recompense in this, that they are serving those whom the Master owns as “these my brethren.”