^ He never disparaged wealth, or slighted the qualities by which it is acquired. He did not tell men that it is a sin to make money, or to take pleasure in making it. He knew how strong a force wealth exerts ; how it fascinates and enthralls ; how the passion for it, if left uncontrolled, takes possession of a man's whole being. To expel an instinct so deeply rooted in human nature is impossible ; the attempt to expel it savours of Mani- cheism. But, though not expelled, the instinct may be held in check ; and if so restrained, it can be only by some force of even greater power. Such a force, such a motive. Christian faith and Christian loyalty can supply. The man who consecrates the hours of business as truly as the hours of prayer, who carries on his secular calling as the servant of Christ, is safeguarded against the incitements to evil that beset other men ; and there is no sure defence beside this. For such a victory over impulse from within and temptation from without, it is useless to rely on a negative and prohibitive code ; even positive law is not enough ; a man must have that personal devotion which brings with it the strength and the inspiration that enable him to keep the law.^
II.
The Lovek of Money.
1. The text gives us a life-like portrait of the avaricious and covetous man. There are two phrases in which his primary features are described. He loves money ; he reaches out after it. He is possessed by a fierce and burning passion for wealth. He loves money as some folk love their children. He loves money as some saints love their God. It glows and burns within him, a hot, fierce, insatiable affection. To craving he adds determination. To the ardour of desire he engages the energy of his will. The executive forces of his life are all enlisted in the gratification of
* C. Silvester Home.
' L-ffe of R. W. DaZe of Birmingham, by his Son, 145. I THESS.-HEB. lO
146 THE LOVE OF MONEY
the one passion, in the tireless pursuit of wealth. He " reaches after " it ! — that is a tremendous, living word ; it is pregnant with the profoundest significance. There is all the suggestiveness about it of trembling strain. It is the reaching out of the racer who is nearly at the goal. Every muscle on the stretch ! He reaches out after it ! Such is the portrait of the man described in the text. He burns with the passion for money. The energy of his life is engaged to satisfy the craving. All the powers of body and mind and soul are reaching after it, if, perchance, the coveted inheritance may be gained.
^ A great living physician told me how once he was attending the death-bed of a rich man who seemed as if he could not die ; for, with aimless and nervous restlessness, his hands kept moving and opening and shutting over the counterpane. " What is the matter ? " asked the physician. " I know," answered the son for his speechless father. " Every night, before he went to sleep, my father liked to feel and handle some of his bank-notes." The son slipped a £10 note into the old man's hand, and, feeling, handling, and clutching it, he died. Ah me ! that £10 note grasped in his trembling hand — how much would it avail him before the awful bar of God ? Yet how many men die, and have nothing better to show to God than that !^
2. Notice that this money-lover is not necessarily a rich man. When we speak of the dangers of covetousness, the great mass of persons who are not rich are apt to think that the warning applies only to the wealthy. It is a great mistake. The old woman who hoards her few shillings and tells lies about them in a back street, the needy clerk secretly longing for the death of some one who may leave him £20, the mechanic fraudulently trying to make bad work pass for good, the begging-letter impostor, the hulking idler, the anarchist indulging in senseless ravings to persuade men that luck will come to them by the ruin of tens of thousands more worthy than themselves — all these are as ardent money lovers and money seekers as the man who greedily accumulates his millions.
^ Have not men, shut up in solitary imprisonment, found an interest in marking the moments by straight strokes of a certain length on the wall, until the growth of the sum of straight strokes,
^ F. W. Farrar, Social and Present-Day Questions^ 113.
I TIMOTHY VI. lo T47
arranged in triangles, has become a mastering purpose ? Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit ? That will help us to understand how the love of accumulating money grows an absorbing passion in men whose imaginations, even in the very beginning of their hoard, showed them no purpose beyond it.^
■[j That silver mine of Demas was a mine for pilgrims, and, as this, it still stands here unexhausted by the side of the way The abounding ambition among us, after all, is not that we may be wise, and not that we may be good, but that we may be rich. Professing Christians beyond reckoning, from motives more or less plausible, and sometimes in themselves even praiseworthy, have set their hearts upon wealth as their absorbing pursuit. Between this and " the love of money " — the sacrificing of all that is spiritual, and of much that is moral, in presence of a likelihood of " richly providing for ourselves " — there is only a narrow and precarious interval. The man that " will be rich," whether or not he succeeds, is in peril of falling into the mean idolatry of covet- ousness as the years advance. It is a miserable probabihty. Our regrets would not waste themselves upon men of the By-ends stamp, to whom the mine of Demas is but a picturesque completion of all that they ever have been, or were ever likely to become. But our regrets must linger over the men who have tasted of better things, and are capable of nobler interests, yet have per- mitted themselves to be mocked into a keen-eyed scramble for the particles of silver which sparkle among the sinking rubbish of the world's caverns, while the sun is shining on the neighbouring road that it may light them to the land of eternal wealth. Within our churches there are many, in all the stages of this temptation, and perhaps not witting of their personal peril, who would do well to take to heart this impressive picture which Bunyan draws of the fiendish showman and his treacherous show, so hard by the road to the heavenly City.^