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      No man can be truly religious, religious after the fashion of Jesus, and grow careless of the world’s misery. No man can go down into the deeps of life and try to bear its stripes, and be anything less than a disciple of Jesus, though he may have never so much as heard of him. The organized religions of men may not acknowledge such a soul, but he bears branded on his body the marks of his Master. I sometimes think there is nothing in life quite so dreadful as the indifference of fashionable people to the cry of the outcast and uttermost. The social world goes on with its butterfly frivolities, its pitiful and puttering inanities, while the souls and bodies of its brethren and sisters rot in the slums, and no man careth for them. It parades up and down the aisles of our churches and kneels with much display at the altar, and thinks to have “done its religion,” while its ears are deaf to the dropping of tears and its soul hard to the breaking of hearts. It chants its creed and recites its prayers, and goes away with much complacency, deeming that it has done God’s service, but it hears not the voice that comes cutting through the atmosphere of pretense and hypocrisy: “I was an hungered, and ye gave me no meat; naked, and ye clothed me not. I was athirst and ye gave me no [14] drink; sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not . . . Verily, verily, I say unto you, inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least, ye did it not unto me.”

Burt Estes Howard, The Test (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1914) : 13
U Michigan copy/scan (via google books) : link
same (one of multiple copies, via hathitrust) : link

—

Burt Estes Howard (1862-1913), Presbyterian and later Unitarian minister; later associated with Stanford University

see Daniel Harper, Obscure Unitarians: Burt Estes Howard (“An excerpt from my forthcoming book on Unitarians in Palo Alto,” March 31, 2022) : link
 

2 January 2026