slay us like moths, and, as moths, we shall be wise to live out of their way. So the practical and immediate office of gold and diamonds is the multiplied destruction of souls, in whatever sense you have been taught to understand that phrase." How can it be otherwise? A passion that perverts, corrupts and debases, that blinds the mind, deadens the conscience and degrades the affections, is necessarily soul-destroying. It has no welcome for God, no desire for His blessing, no joy in His service; but gradually paralyzes the religious nature, and consumes all spiritual susceptibility. Before heaven is reached this fever has burnt up everything that fits for heaven, and before hell opens wide its ponderous gates this frenzy has plunged the shriveled spirit into the depths of deepest fire. "Oh, cursed lust of gold! when for thy sake The fool throws up his interest in both worlds Mammon may be a good and useful servant, but he is a foul and tyrannous lord. His shackles no true man should consent to wear. They may be broken, they should be despised. When Camillus found Sulpitious trying to rescue Rome from the barbarian by large sums of money he proudly exclaimed: "It is with steel, not gold, that Romans guard their country." And it is with the sword of the Spirit, and not with paltry pelf, that our nation is to be helped and delivered from savagery. That sword in the hands of Christ can free the people from the disgraceful semi-barbarism which now afflicts. Take the Word of God, accept its teachings, make its Divine Author "Master," and in submitting to His authority, that which is now your lord will become your slave. All you now possess in this world you may continue to possess; but with Christ in your heart its relation to you will be changed. It will be your servant, not your sovereign, and you will send MAMMON CONQUERED. 325 it on messages of peace and mercy to the ends of the earth. And with the sense of emancipation will come the feeling of proprietorship in more than silver can buy or gold secure. However poor you may be in the perishable riches, you will realize that you own all things. Looking up into God's face you will be able to say "My Father"; the universe will be yours in the highest sense, for you will have attained the art of appropriating its inner treasures. Christ yours, the church yours, heaven yours,— what more can be needed to complete your felicity? Here have we true riches; blessed is he who finds them! "Leave wealth behind; bring God thy heart-best light All gifts, the heart, and buy it with my love; PAUPERISM, "Ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good." Math. xiv, 7. I "All the care Ingenious parsimony takes, but just Saves the small inventory, bed and stool, Cowper. AM reminded by the breath of autumn, chill prophet of winter's approaching frost, and by the tattered forms of trees, gaunt harbingers of earth's melancholy season, of those sad classes against whose doors the snow forever beats and drives, and through whose "looped and windowed raggedness" the biting wind too freely blows. "Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel; That thou may'st shake the superflux to them, Christianity is the eldest and only born daughter of that venerable religion whose care for the poor was among the chiefest of its glories. Whatever may be said to the discredit of Judaism, it cannot fairly be charged that the unfortunate were neglected in its ministrations. It was a thoroughly humane system, seeking to shield the weak from the strong, and to protect the indigent from the rapacious exactions of the affluent. Pinched want and heaped plenty were never known during its sway, as they GOD AND THE POOR. 327 have been since, and under dispensations reputed to surpass it in philanthropy. Rarely were men seen in Israel who had been fleeced, stripped, and beggared by the heartless schemes of capitalists and monopolists; and only toward the close of its history was such a contrast possible as that which Jesus painted in the parable of Dives and Lazarus. Pauperism and mendicancy were not among the crying evils of the nation in its palmy days, in the days when its people were free, and when princes of the house of Judah reigned. In those halcyon times, from psalms of praise and from sacred statutes continually was heard the voice of God befriending the friendless and pleading the cause of the necessitous. "Blessed is he that considereth the poor; the Lord will deliver him in time of trouble;" "The needy shall not always be forgotten, the expectation of the poor shall not perish forever," chanted the singers; "Whoso reproacheth the poor reproacheth his Maker," echoed the teachers. "When thou goest into thy neighbor's vineyard," the law enacted, "thou mayest eat grapes thy fill, but thou shalt not put any in thy vessel;" and it commanded the landowners to leave standing the corn in the corners of the field, and not to turn back to gather in the gleanings. These were for the foodless and the destitute. The law likewise forbade the rich to impose charges on the poor for money lent; and, if a garment had been pledged for security, it decreed: "In any case thou shalt deliver him the pledge when the sun goeth down, that he may sleep in his own raiment." Such provisions as these, and others that I care not to recall, prove that the mother of Christianity looked tenderly on poverty, did not stigmatize it as a crime, but regarded it as a misfortune to be treated with with the most generous compassion. But what of the daughter? Has she inherited these traditions and this spirit? That it was the Lord's will that she should do so is evident from His own ministry. It is said that "the common people heard Him gladly," and their attention to His words may have been largely secured by His thoughtfulness of their bodies. Wherever He went He healed the sick, restored the lame, opened the eyes of the blind, fed the starving multitude with miraculous bread, and in these various ways evinced His interest in their temporal well-being. Even in "preaching the gospel to the poor," which He adduced in support of His Messianic claims, He sought to deliver them from the evils of this life almost as much as to prepare them for the life to come. He was not only the Savior of the lowly, He was their Benefactor as well. And that His disciples were to share with Him in this mission of philanthropy is intimated not only in the kindly words of the text, and in the command, "Freely ye have received, freely give,” but by the fact that one of His little company carried "the bag,' whose scanty contents were devoted to the worthy indigent. Thus was He understood by the primitive church, and hence in her early history, to meet peculiar or pressing exigencies, all possessions were held in common, and to secure equality of distribution a special office was instituted. While this Christian communism speedily passed away, the apostles did not hesitate to enjoin upon the churches the most liberal charity. Contributions were called for in aid of the more destitute brethren, and were cheerfully given by the more prosperous. In Paul's second letter to the Corinthians considerable attention is paid to this subject, where a few comprehensive and wide-reaching principles are laid down for the regulation of benevolence, and in other portions of the New Testament its exercise is made the test of true discipleship. There it is written: "Whoso hath this world's goods and seeth his brother in need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?" And even when |