How To Treat the Poor

According to a few experts.  Excerpts follow:

...Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

and

...Perhaps Vernon [the beggar] is an angel in disguise. St. Francis of Assisi, even before his conversion, handled beggars like this,

He was not one of those typical society men who hardly have a penny to give a beggar, but willingly spend their hundreds on a champagne feast. His way of thinking was the following: "If I am generous, yes, even extravagant with my friends who at the best only say 'thanks' to me for them, or repay me with another invitation, how much greater grounds have I for alms giving which God himself has promised to repay a hundredfold?" 

This was the inspiring life thought of the Middle Ages, which here carried out the genially literal and genially naive translation of the words of the gospel: "As long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me." Francis knew — as the whole Middle Ages knew it — that not even a glass of cold water, given by the disciples, would remain unpaid and unrewarded by the Master.

Therefore a pang went through his heart when, one day as there was a crowd in the shop, and he was in a hurry to get through, he had sent a beggar away. "If this man had come from one of my friends," said he to himself, "from Count this or Baron that, he would have got what he asked for. Now he comes from the King of kings and from the Lord of lords, and I let him go away empty-handed. I even gave him a repelling word." And he determined from that day on to give to every one who asked him in God's name — per amor di Dio, as the Italian beggars still are wont to say...