You, in Philadelphia, have your Octavia Hill Association, that has shown us how to redeem a whole street. I have told you of our efforts in our worse slum. It is so everywhere. I am my brother’s keeper, and I am ashamed at last not to own it. That is the key-note of the whole modern reform movement, the new charity, the new school, the social settlement and all; and thank God for it!

How long we were finding out that we were neighbors! A year or two ago, I went to a suburb of New York to speak of these things, even as I am now speaking to you. And when that evening I sat at the family board with my host, who was a clergyman, a secretary in a foreign mission board, he said, looking around upon his little ones, that, if I could find him a poor widow in the city with five children of their ages, whom they could go along with and help as they grew, I would be doing a good thing for them and a better thing for his children. And I promised, for that was ideal charity, neighbor with neighbor.

But it was not easy. Weeks passed before I found a family in an East-side tenement that just filled the requirements. It was Christmas Eve, and, while I stayed to look them over, I came to love them, the good children and the brave little woman fighting her fight all unaided. She told me that she was a scrub-woman in a public building; but it was not until I had gone half way over to the office, to tell my friend on the telephone that I had found what he sought, that I thought of asking Where she scrubbed. I went back to ask her.

And where was it, do you think? In the mission building, on his floor! Between them was just the thickness of the oaken door, all the time she had been needing him as he did her, and neither knew where to find the other. They were neighbors in very truth, and they did not know it.

It may be that your neighbor lives as near to you, in want of much that you can give, your love and friendship first and last. Go and seek him. And when you have found him, bind up his wounds, help him and care for him; and, when you must depart on the morrow, leave of your substance that he may be cared for until you come that way again. That was neighborliness as the Good Samaritan saw it.

“Go,” said the Saviour, “go, and do thou likewise.”