If you could exclude the air from the rays of the fire, the fire itself would soon languish and die in the midst of its fuel; and so a man's joy in his wealth is kept alive by the air which it warms; and if pent within itself, is extinguished.
"And this, my brethren, leads me to another view of the vast subject opened to us by the words of the apostle, 'Every man shall bear his own burden.' The worldly conditions of life are unequal.

Why are they unequal?
O my brethren, do you not perceive?
Think you that, if it had been better for our spiritual probation that there should be neither great nor lowly, rich nor poor, Providence would not so have ordered the dispensations of the world, and so, by its mysterious but merciful agencies, have influenced the framework and foundations of society?
But if from the remotest period of human annals, and in all the numberless experiments of government which the wit of man has devised, still this inequality is ever found to exist, may we not suspect that there is something in the very principles of our nature to which that inequality is necessary and essential?
Ask why this inequality?
Why ?--as well ask why life is the sphere of duty and the nursery of virtues! For if all men were equal, if there were no suffering and no ease, no poverty and no wealth, would you not sweep with one blow the half, at least, of human virtues from the world?
If there were no penury and no pain, what would become of fortitude; what of patience; what of resignation?
If there were no greatness and no wealth, what would become of benevolence, of charity, of the blessed human pity, of temperance in the midst of luxury, of justice in the exercise of power?
Carry the question further; grant all conditions the same,--no reverse, no rise, and no fall, nothing to hope for, nothing to fear,--what a moral death you would at once inflict upon all the energies of the soul, and what a link between the Heart of Man and the Providence of God would be snapped asunder! If we could annihilate evil, we should annihilate hope; and hope, my brethren, is the avenue to faith.

If there be 'a time to weep and a time to laugh,' it is that he who mourns may turn to eternity for comfort, and he who rejoices may bless God for the happy hour.

Ah, my brethren, were it possible to annihilate the inequalities of human life, it would be the banishment of our worthiest virtues, the torpor of our spiritual nature, the palsy of our mental faculties.

The moral world, like the world without us, derives its health and its beauty from diversity and contrast.
"'Every man shall bear his own burden.' True; but now turn to an earlier verse in the same chapter,--'Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.' Yes, while Heaven ordains to each his peculiar suffering, it connects the family of man into one household, by that feeling which, more perhaps than any other, distinguishes us from the brute creation,--I mean the feeling to which we give the name of sympathy,--the feeling for each other! The herd of deer shun the stag that is marked by the gunner; the flock heedeth not the sheep that creeps into the shade to die; but man has sorrow and joy not in himself alone, but in the joy and sorrow of those around him.