“Have you never tried to paraphrase the teachings of Christ by clothing them in the garb of our modern everyday life? You often get new lights by this method.

A certain family moved down from a church neighborhood into a disreputable district, made unfortunate acquaintances, and one and all went to the bad and by and by were stripped of everything but a few rags.

And by chance there came down a minister of the gospel. And when he saw these people he avoided them.

And likewise a layman — a trustee, probably, or a vestryman. He stopped at their door, looked in on them, and after pondering the matter well went away, saying to himself, ‘The trouble with that class of people is that they are almost certain to impose on you’ — the very thing we do to God’s mercy every day.

My fellow workers, God does not judge people by classes, any more than he saves them by classes; he makes them one by one and judges them one by one, and as surely as he is our pattern we ought to wipe that phrase out of Christian speech. The parable points the finger of condemnation directly at it. Class? That class? Our circle? Their circle? The Christian circle is the circumference of the earth — at the equator; where it is the largest.” — George W. Cable, “The Good Samaritan” (an address delivered before the New Orleans Sunday-School Association, April 4, 1881) in The Negro Question: A Selection of Writings on Civil Rights in the South (1958), p. 35