"Sad losses have ye met,
But mine is heavier yet, For a believing heart hath gone from me."
" Alas ! " these pilgrims said,
"For the living and the dead, For fortune's cruelty, for love's sure cross,
For the wrecks of land and sea !
But, howe'er it came to thee, Thine, stranger, is life's last and heaviest loss.
For the believing heart has gone from thee —
Ah, the believing heart has gone from thee."^
3. Another result is that avarice issues in moral degeneracy of every kind. In one of Turner's pictures, a great symbolic picture, he paints the demon of covetousness, and he puts him into the shape of a dragon. But Turner makes the back of that dragon wear the appearance of a glacier. It has all the suggestiveness of ice, the coldness of ice, without its fragility. Do you see the purpose of that? Wherever the demon of covetousness makes his abode, he freezes the genial currents of the soul. The suggestion of that glacier back is that, wherever the demon of covetousness exercises his tyranny, the moral sense begins to be petrified ; the moral sense, which ought to be sensitive to even the faintest approaches of evil, becomes congealed into ice. The dragon congeals into hardness and benumbment something that ought to be soft and responsive. And then when a man's moral sense begins to be petrified he begins to engage in all manner of casuistry, excuses, pleas, reasons, equivocations, ambiguities. Why, a man frames for himself a new vocabulary, and in the soft and cushioned significance of his own language he finds his ease. And then out of the casuistry and equivocation there comes the whole black, hellish brood of falsehood, unfairness, injustice, and fraud.
*[j There is no vice more deadening to every noble and tender feeling than avarice. It is capable of extinguishing all mercy, all pity, all natural affection. It can make the claims of the suffering
^ Frances Browne.
I TIMOTHY VI. lo 151
and sorrowful, even when they are combined with those of an old friend, or a wife, or a child, fall on deaf ears. It can banish from the heart not only all love, but all shame and self-respect. What does the miser care for the execrations of outraged society, so long as he can keep his gold ? There is no heartless or mean act, and very often no deed of fraud or violence, from which he will shrink in order to augment or preserve his hoards. Every criminal who wants an accomplice can have the avaricious man as his helper, if he only bids high enough.^
^ Avarice is represented as an old woman with a veil over her forehead, and a bag of money in each hand, A figure very marvellous for power of expression. The throat is all made up of sinews with skinny channels deep between them, strained as by anxiety, and wasted by famine ; the features hunger-bitten, the eyes hollow, the look glaring and intense, yet without the slightest caricature. Inscribed in the Eenaissance copy " Avaritia Impletor," Spenser's Avarice (the vice) is much feebler than this ; but the god Mammon and his kingdom have been described by him with his usual power. Note the position of the house of Eichesse :
Betwixt them both was but a little stride.
That did the House of Eichesse from Hell -mouth divide.
It is curious that most moralists confuse avarice with covetous- ness, although they are vices totally different in their operation on the human heart and on the frame of society. The love of money, the sin of Judas and Ananias, is indeed the root of all evil in the hardening of the heart ; but " covetousness, which is idolatry," the sin of Ahab, that is, the inordinate desire of some seen or recognized good, — thus destroying peace of mind, — is probably productive of much more misery in heart, and error in conduct, than avarice, itself, only covetousness is not so inconsistent with Christianity : for covetousness may partly proceed from vividness of the affections and hopes, as in David, and be consistent with much charity ; not so avarice.^
4. Last of all, the issues of this passion of greed are described in the concluding clause of the text in these words : " And they have pierced themselves through with many sorrows." Avarice poisons the wells of joy. Those inner pools in the life, which ought to provide sweetness and rest, become ministers of bitterness and
^ A. Plummer, The Pastoral Epistles, 196.
' Euskin, Stones oj Venice, ii. § 90 ( Works, x. 403).
152 THE LOVE OF MONEY
grief. The money-lover is pierced through and through with many sorrows. Dante in his great Vision of Hell, in the fourth circle of hell, comes upon the avaricious and the covetous, and he describes to us the punishment which is theirs. " Then I beheld a crowd more dense than all, and on this side and on that with howling cries, each rolling with his chest a ponderous ball." In hell they rolled their ball with their chest, and met others who were rolling theirs, and they clashed and they turned, rolling their ball back, and turned again, and so on and so on in ever restless, unsatisfying movements. We do not know what awaits the ungodly in worlds to be, but we say that the avaricious man knows that kind of hell here and now. He rolls his ball in ever- shifting movement and never finds a rest. In the life of the money-lover there are restlessness, disappointment, the stingings of a low remorse, a painful sense of emptiness ; the life is pierced through and through with many sorrows.