Every one of those blackguards is the bane of a family.
That is the deadly "indiscriminate charity"--the charity which each
household pays to maintain its own private curse.
133. And you think that is no affair of yours? and that every family
ought to watch over and subdue its own living plague? Put it to
yourselves this way, then: suppose you knew every one of those families
kept an idol in an inner room--a big-bellied bronze figure, to which
daily sacrifice and oblation was made; at whose feet so much beer and
brandy was poured out every morning on the ground; and before which,
every night, good meat, enough for two men's keep, was set, and left,
till it was putrid, and then carried out and thrown on the dunghill; you
would put an end to that form of idolatry with your best diligence, I
suppose. You would understand then that the beer, and brandy, and meat,
were wasted; and that the burden imposed by each household on itself lay
heavily through them on the whole community? But, suppose further, that
this idol were not of silent and quiet bronze only, but an ingenious
mechanism, wound up every morning, to run itself down into automatic
blasphemies; that it struck and tore with its hands the people who set
food before it; that it was anointed with poisonous unguents, and
infected the air for miles round.
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