III.
The Fruit of the Love of Money.
1. Wherever the consuming love of wealth is allowed to dwell, men become alienated from their God. They are " led astray from the faith." That is always the first thing that happens. When
* George Eliot, &ila^ Mamer.
' J. A. Kerr Bain, The People of tht Fiigrim<tg«, ii. 379,
148 THE LOVE OF MONEY
we enter into sin it is always the most delicate things that are first destroyed. When a man begins to drink, to become a drunkard, he may go on for years and we see no witness of it in his face. The flesh may be the last thing to be touched; but we have a tremendously wide range in our endowments, and we go from flesh right up to the most delicate feelers that perceive God. And when men enter into sin, into any kind of unholy fellowship, the first thing to suffer is the most exquisite, the feeler after God. " They are led astray from the faith." The first thing to go is spiritual sensitiveness. They come to have broken com- munion with God, and then an interrupted sense of the Lord's presence, until at length God becomes an absentee ; and as soon as ever men obtain an absentee God they enthrone something else in His place. When I enter into sin, the first thing to be con- sumed is the topmost part of my life. The first thing to go is not the basement; the first thing to go is the skylight. When I enter into sin it is not the kitchen in my life that is first destroyed, but the oratory, where I commune with my God. When this more delicate thing has been destroyed, I come to have broken and interrupted communion with my Lord, and then at length I cease to have communion at all.
•[j In Southern France, where attar of roses is distilled, a very curious ailment imperils the workers. The very abundance of the rose-leaves induces a sort of sleeping sickness. And surely it is even so in the abundances that are sometimes given to man. They are prone to sink him into the sleep of spiritual forgetful- ness. A man's devotion is apt to dwindle as he becomes more successful. Our piety does not keep pace with our purse. Absorp- tion in bounty makes us forgetful of the Giver. We can be so concerned in the pasturage that the Shepherd is forgotten. Our very fulness is apt to become our foe. Our clearest visions are given us in the winter-time when nature is scanty and poor. The fulness of the leaf blocks the outlook and the distance is hid. And the summer-time of life, when leaves and flowers are plenti- ful, is apt to bring a veil. And the very plentifulness impedes, our communion.^
2. With this loss of spiritual consciousness there comes a weaker faith. For what is faith ? Faith is a man's inclination towards the Eternal. We do not give that as a definition ; we ' J. H. Jowett, Thmg$ That Matter Most (1913), 34.
I TIMOTHY VI. lo 149
give it as a description. Faith is a man's inclination towards the Eternal; faith is a man's pose towards the Infinite; faith is a man's receptiveness towards his God. A love of money annihilates that ; the faculty shrivels up into a small self-dependence, and an uncertain waiting upon the ministry of chance. A lost conscious- ness of God, a weakened faith, and surely a dulled apprehension of immortality ! He loses the very taste of " the powers of the life to come," The hereafter has no existence as an efficient and operative factor in his life. He has no correspondences with the world to come ; they are destroyed.
^ Does it matter what a man believes ? It matters greatly in the shaping of his character if it be a living belief and not a mere tradition or convention. But it matters not less, perhaps more, whether he retains the believing spirit at all, an uncorrupted sense of the goodness and wonder and*naoral meaning of human experi- ence, an upper realm of light and faith in some form or other, with an eye for some celestial truth and a heart prepared to trust and rejoice according to that truth. Is there any calamity more deadly than the decay and death of the very capacity of the heart for believing high things ? ^
Upon the white sea-sand
There sat a pilgrim band Telling the losses that their lives had known,
While evening waned away
From breezy cliff and bay, And the strong tides went out with weary moan.
There were who mourned their youth
With a most loving ruth, For its brave hopes and memories ever green;
And one upon the West
Turned an eye that would not rest For far-off hills whereon its joy had been.
Some talked of vanished gold,
Some of proud honours told, Some spake of friends that were their trust no more;
And one of a green grave
Beside a foreign wave, That made him sit so lonely on the shore.
* E. E. Welsh, Man to Man, 221.
I50 THE LOVE OF MONEY
But when their tales were done,
There spake among them one, A stranger, seeming from all sorrow free: —