touchstone archives
Commonplaces
Piquant excerpts lifted from Touchstone editors' own reading & listening.
Had I believed that certain death would have been the consequences to myself and the whole family of taking Johnny Stall and Ed Fisher into the house, it would have been my duty to have done it. Neither of them had any other home, for Mr. Stall (where Fisher lodged) had fled into the country, and had I shut my doors upon them, they must have perished in the streets. Remember, my dear creature, the difference between the law [of Moses] and the gospel. The former only commands us “to love our neighbors as ourselves,” but the latter bids us to love them better than ourselves. “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another as I have loved you.” Had I not believed in the full import of that divine and sublime text of Scripture, I could not have exposed myself with so little concern, nay, with so much pleasure, for five weeks past to the contagion of the prevailing fever. I did not dare to desert my post, and I believed fear even for a moment to be an act of disobedience to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
—Benjamin Rush
explaining in a letter to his absent wife why he took in two homeless men during a yellow fever epidemic (1793)
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