Only this can light the grave,
Thou hast died : — and Thou wilt save :—
Thou by lying low in earth
Hast assured our second birth,
Bidding in the sunless tomb
Amaranthine roses bloom.
If the spirit shivering shrink From annihilation's brink, Through the soul like sunshine come, " Death is but another womb : Born through woe to human breath, Ye are born to God through death."
1 H. C. G. Moule, All in Christ, 62.
1 TIMOTHY IV. 8 137
Nearer than the nearest by,
Be beside me when I die !
With Thy strength my weakness nerve
Ne'er through fear from faith to swerve;
So, Death's storm- vex'd portal past,
Safe in Thee to sleep at last.^
^ F. T. Palgrave, Amenophis and Other Poems,
The Love of Money.
X99
Literature.
Binney (T), Money : A Popular Exposition, 78. Brown (J. B.), Our Morals and Manners, 95. Farrar (F. W.), Social and Present-Day Questions, 108. Figgis (J. N.), Antichrist, 195.
Plummer (A.), The Pastoral Epistles (Expositor's Bible), 188. Trench (R. C), Sermons New and Old, 60.
Christian World Pulpit, liv. 156 (A. Jenkinson) ; Ixv. 81 (J. H. Jowett) ; Ixvi. 213 (C. S. Home) ; Ixxv. 263 (A. W. Hutton).
The Love of Money,
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil : which some reaching after have been led astray from the faith, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows. — i Tim. vi. lo.
It is with no uncertain voice that Scripture speaks of the sin of avarice. There, as in these words of St. Paul, or as in those of Christ our Lord, " Take heed and beware of covetousness," we are warned with all plainness of speech against it; even as we are again and again reminded of other sins and further dangers which this sin draws after it. Nor is the warning of Scripture given by earnest words only ; it is given also by terrible examples. What a dread procession of souls, which, losing heaven, very often did not win that earth for which they were content to lose it, is made there to pass before us: Achan, who thought to enrich himself with that wedge of gold and that Babylonish garment, and for whom that wedge of gold served but as it were to cleave his soul asunder, while that Babylonish garment proved to him no better than a winding sheet : Gehazi, with two talents of silver and the five changes of raiment, which he obtained by a lie from Naaman — Gehazi who did not take account of the garment which he should never change, of that robe of leprosy which should cling to him and to his children for ever: and Balaam, who loved the wages of unrighteousness, but who took no gain of money, though he had made shipwreck of all in order that he might take it. There, too, is the betrayer, who purchased " the field of blood " with the reward of iniquity, being himself the first to handsel that field with his own. These are but a few of the beacon lights which in Scripture have been kindled towards us from the rocks and quicksands on which so many have perished.
The Apostle's warning is a solemn one, and the words of the text are indeed terrible words. They set before us what may be the perilous results to a Christian man of his giving way to the
142 THE LOVE OF MONEY
desire and determination to be rich. They are spoken of Christians — for some of the evils enumerated could occur only in the case of such.
^ In Brailsford's book, The Sinritual Sense in Sacred Legend, we are told that Noah had a vision of coming calamity and that he and Methuselah went to Enoch for an explanation. Enoch detailed the sins that had deserved the flood, and among others mentioned the forging into weapons of war of the metals which had been discovered, and the moulding of them into coinage, and the finding of jewels and polishing them, from pride and luxury. We are told later that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, but it is strange to hear that the prolific root was planted so early.^
I.
The Love of LIoney.
1. "The love of money," says the Apostle, "is a root of all kinds of evil." That is to say, a germ of all evil lies in one witli the love of money, and there is no kind of evil to which a man may not be led through an absorbing greed for gold. It is a root sin, for it leads to care, fear, malice, deceit, oppression, envy, bribery, perjury, contentiousness. It is of course not the only root sin. Pride and lust, the world and the flesh, are roots of evil quite as really as the love of money, and have their own evil offshoots as well. But there is no evil, St. Paul would say, which may not spring from avarice.
^ For money, men, alike rich and poor, have been ready to make all their lives a lie to themselves and a fraud upon their neighbours. For gold men have betrayed their country, their friends, their God, their immortal souls. For gold they steal, and rob, and break open houses, and commit assaults and murders, and become the terrors and scourges of society. For gold men forge and cheat and start bubble companies and tamper with securities, and snatch the support of the widow, and steal the bread of the fatherless. For gold they live by trades and manufactures which are the curse and destruction of mankind. For gold they involve whole countries in the horrors and crimes of war. For gold they soil the honour of their sons, and sell their daughters into gilded misery, and poison the world with stagnant gossip, and stab noble * Archibald Alexander.