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creatures such an easy prey to it that labour or painful effort was an experience it never knew. Its only enemies were its prey; and these enemies were altogether powerless to resist it, while its food was always superabundant. And so the ichthyosaurus died out. It died of too much ease. Its extinction was the inevit- able result of its luxury. Vital energy began to ebb ; structural refinement did not increase, because it was not wanted; the size and strength of the monster meant diminished need for intelligence, and the ascent of intelhgence was checked. Nature was against it. It transgressed the fundamental law of upward-moving life, and it was swept into the limbo of forgotten things.^
(3) Money creates wants as well as meets them. — As a rule, "where goods increase, they are increased that eat them." The more a man has, the more he is called to part with ; and the deeper his pocket, the more constant is the drain upon it. The more pos- sessions a man has to carry with him through life, the weightier is his burden, not the lighter. History tells us that the Spartans at one time had a practice of coining all their money in iron, that so the people might be discouraged from avarice by feeling that every addition to their money meant an added weight to bear. How true are the wise man's words when he says that the abundance of the rich man's possessions " will not suffer him to sleep." For money, if itself " a defence," also requires a defence for its safe-keeping. And with all his watchfulness a man cannot sometimes prevent his " riches making themselves wings and flying away." Wealth at the worst is a source of danger, at the best a source of care.
^ I do not know nor desire to know if theologians have yet come to a scientific conclusion with regard to the poverty of Jesus, but it seems evident to me that poverty with the labour of the hands is the ideal held up by the Galilean to the efforts of His disciples. Still it is easy to see that Franciscan poverty is neither to be confounded with the unfeeling pride of the stoic, nor with the stupid horror of all joy felt by certain devotees; St. Francis renounced everything only that he might the better possess everything. The lives of the immense majority of our contemporaries are ruled by the fatal error that the more one possesses the more one enjoys. Our exterior, civil liberties continually increase, but at the same time our inward freedom is ^ H. Kix, Sermons, Addresses, and Essays, 161.
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taking flight ; how many are there among us who are literally possessed by what they possess ? ^
2. The other extreme that Agur would be delivered from is poverty. The thought is of dire poverty, of sheer destitution, or, at least, of that precarious livelihood that is always on the verge of want, and is therefore oppressed with the ever-haunting fear of the distress which can never be quite out of sight.
(1) Poverty has this great advantage over wealth, that it compels to honest labour, it guards and protects the soul from the thousand vices of idleness by pre-occupying the heart and hands with good wholesome work ; the body healthfully wearied by honest toil, even if it be never so hard, is rewarded by peaceful slumber when the day's work is done. " The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much : but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep." It is no curse indeed, but the greatest blessing ever sent upon an ignorant and childish world, to be forced to labour that we may eat.
But the thought in the text is the evil influence of extreme poverty on character. There are currents of influence that originate in the material environment of a man's life and yet flow in upon his very soul, helping or hindering his spiritual life. Man has a body and a soul ; at least, so we roughly and popularly divide his complex nature. But body and soul are not independent; they act and react upon each other. Spiritual coldness may sometimes have its physical causes. We may, Faber says, " attri- bute to the wiles of Satan what is really a matter of nerves or of digestion " ; and a body that is either pampered and indulged or ailing and emaciated and fatigued may have a depressing effect upon the moral life. It is only stating the same truth a little more broadly to say that a man's temporal circumstances may influence for good or evil his spiritual prosperity ; you cannot draw a sharp line of cleavage between temporal and spiritual affairs any more than you can between body and soul. And we may find in the outward circumstances of our lives some of the stepping-stones by which we rise to heaven, or some of the temptations that drag us to destruction.
There is an extreme of poverty which seems as unfavourable
^ P. Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi, 126.
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to the higher life as the extreme of riches. It may be such as to expose one to almost irresistible temptation, " lest I be poor and steal." If food and warmth are not obtainable by honest means, is it wonderful that poor souls sometimes take a short cut and transgress ? And even if that gross temptation is avoided, temptation comes in other forms, more subtle but equally strong. The constant anxiety, the ceaseless worry, the endless battle with the wolf at the door, may create a weary, listless, hopeless frame of mind that has not energy enough to respond to the call of God.