I have been a Christian for 46 years now and the most important lesson I have ever learned is, as Christians we simply must be among the downtrodden, the poor and downcast.

 "The mind that is rich in holiness and the humanities, appreciates every temptation, computes the force of every passion, and discerns the degradation of every vice, with a precision and clearness unknown to the adept in wrong. When the woman who was caught in adultery stood alone and confounded before Christ, how little did she know of her own abased and abject mind, how much less of the majestic being before her, whose steady eye, as it looked upon her, she could not meet! yet how vividly, and with what results of considerate yet cautious sympathy, did the disorder of her moral nature present itself to him who knew no defilement! Like the pure and silent stars that look down by night upon the foulness and the din of cities, his heavenly spirit gazed direct into the turbid hiding places of sin. He saw it indeed, simply as it will see itself in retrospect...." Martineau.