This section is from the book "Floral Biography Or Chapters On Flowers", by Charlotte Elizabeth. Also available from Amazon: Floral biography; or, Chapters on flowers.
I should sorrow to see my beautiful hyacinth taken from its warm station, and placed abroad, on this chilly evening, to shrink before the biting frost, to bend beneath the blustering wind, and to break under a load of drifted snow. If the flower could reason, might it not well reproach me, under the circumstances, for hastening its birth into such a wintry world ? Yet, alas; poor Doghery, and many a poor creature like him, could tell a tale of similar desertion, ending in the destruction of the body. The fault rests not with those who take compassion on the perishing victims of popery. We must often say with the apostle, " Silver and gold have I none," but, shall we not proceed to add, " such as I have, give I thee;" and while we behold the immortal spirit lying helpless under the deadening influence of his paralizing disease, are we to refrain from the sequel, " In the name of Jesus of Nazareth arise and walk," because the alms that depended on the continuance of his infirmity may then fail; and we may be unable to provide him with an immediate subsistence ? Even in a temporal visitation, this would be cruel policy; how then can we dare to act upon it in spiritual cases ? No ; we must proclaim deliverance to the captives, though, from lack of service on the part of those who gave the means, we thereby expose them to starvation, if they escape a more immediate and more violent end.
It is certain, that when one of the poor of this world becomes so rich in faith as to be enabled to sacrifice all for Christ, by openly separating from the communion of idolatrous Rome, the means of daily subsistence will fail, so long as he continues among the people whom his poverty precludes him from leaving. The great mass of Irish poor, in St. Giles' and the other districts, are composed of brick-layers' labourers ; and it is a fact, that when one of the number forsakes his false religion, he cannot mount a scaffolding but at the eminent peril of his life ; for his comrades threaten to hurl him headlong if he comes among them. Thus he is driven from his daily labour; and is, moreover, followed through the streets with yells and execrations, accompanied, generally, with some actual violence. I speak from personal observation—I testify what I have seen from day to day; and I cannot but ask, is the Protestantism of our favoured land fallen so low, that we cannot provide means of employment to those who, for Christ's sake and the gospel's, relinquish the daily pittance that was wont to furnish them with a meal of potatoes? When our adored Redeemer spoke the wTords of life to thousands of perishing souls, how sweetly did he express the tender feeling of their bodily infirmities wherewith he was touched—" I have compassion on the multitude ; .. if I send them away fasting, they will faint by the way".
Well, Doghery hungers no more, neither thirsts any more; he has joined the glorious host of martyrs, and his blood has truly been a seed in our Irish church, emboldening many to come out openly from the shambles of Great Babylon into the pastures of Christ's fold. Oh ! when shall arrive that predicted day of divine retribution, that will break " the hammer of the whole earth ! When the Alvas and the Dominicks, the Bonners, the Gardiners, with all the host of sanguinary-tyrants who have trafficked in the souls of men, shall receive at the Lord's hand the cup of retribu tion, and perish, with that desperate delusion, that offspring of Satan, which the Holy Ghost had denounced as the mother of abominations—the woman drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus ! This is not the language of uncharitableness—no : the farthest possible from true charity is that ungodly liberalism which will close its eyes to the plainest declarations of holy writ, and leave men's souls to perish, rather than shock their prejudices. God will not alter the thing that is gone out of his lips; and unless we can expunge from the thirteenth to the twentieth chapter of Revelation, or close our eyes to the clear and indubitable exposition which history supplies, of its actual reference to the papacy, we stand guilty of wilful mutilation of God's word, while withholding those awful appeals from our deluded fellow-creatures of the Romish persuasion, and neglecting to address to them the warning cry, " Come out of her, my people : be ye not partakers of her sins, that ye receive not of her plagues".
 
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