and upon all who believe. This is the turning point of your acceptance with the Lawgiver. And at this step, also, in the history of your souls, will there be applied to you a power of motive, and will you be endowed with an obedient sensibility to the influence of motive, which will make it the turning point of a new heart and a new

character. The particular reformation that we have now been urging will be one of a crowd of other reformations; and, in the spirit of him who pleased not himself, but gave up his life for others, will you forego all the desires of selfishness and vanity, and look not merely to your own things, but also to the things of others.

DISCOURSE VIII.

On the Love of Money.

"If I have made gold my hope, or have said to the fine gold, Thou art my confidence; If I rejoiced because my wealth was great, and because mine hand had gotten much: If I beheld the sun when it shined or the moon walking in brightness; and my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand; this also were an iniquity to be punished by the judge; for I should have denied the God that is above."-Job xxxi. 24-28.

WHAT is worthy of remark in this pas- | dowed him with the organs, of every gratisage is, that a certain affection only known among the votaries of Paganism, should be classed under the same character and have the same condemnation with an affection, not only known, but allowed, nay cherished into habitual supremacy, all over Christendom. How universal is it among those who are in pursuit of wealth, to make gold their hope, and among those who are in possession of wealth, to make fine gold their confidence? Yet we are here told that this is virtually as complete a renunciation of God as to practise some of the worst charms of idolatry. And it might perhaps serve to unsettle the vanity of those who, unsuspicious of the disease that is in their hearts, are wholy given over to this world, and wholly without alarm in their anticipations of another,-could we convince them that the most reigning and resistless desire by which they are actuated, stamps the same perversity on them, in the sight of God, as he sees to be in those who are worshippers of the sun in the firmament, or are offering incense to the moon, as the queen of heaven.

fication,--that he should thus lavish all his desires on the surrounding materialism, and fetch from it all his delights, while the thought of him who formed it is habitually absent from his heart-that in the play of those attractions that subsist between him and the various objects in the neighbourhood of his person, there should be the same want of reference to God, as there is in the play of those attractions which subsist between a piece of unconscious matter and the other matter that is around it— that all the influences which operate upon the human will should emanate from so many various points in the mechanism of what is formed, but that no practical or ascendant influence should come down upon it from the presiding and the preserving Deity? Why, if such be man, he could not be otherwise, though there were no Deity. The part he sustains in the world is the very same that it would have been had the world sprung into being of itself, or without an originating mind had maintained its being from eternity. He just puts forth the evolutions of his own nature, as We recoil from an idolater, as from one one of the component individuals in a vast who labours under a great moral derange-independent system of nature, made up of ment, in suffering his regards to be carried away from the true God to an idol. But, is it not just the same derangement, on the part of man, that he should love any created good, and in the enjoyment of it lose sight of the Creator-that he should delight himself with the use and the possession of a gift, and be unaffected by the circumstance of its having been put into his hands by a giver-that thoroughly absorbed with the present and the sensible gratification, there should be no room left for the movements of duty or regard to the Being who furnished him with the materials, and en

many parts and many individuals. In hungering for what is agreeable to his senses, or recoiling from what is bitter or unsuitable to them, he does so without thinking of God, or borrowing any impulse to his own will from any thing he knows or believes to be the will of God. Religion has just as little to do with those daily movements of his which are voluntary, as it has to do with the growth of his body, which is involuntary; or, as it has to do, in other words, with the progress and the phenomena of vegetation. With a mind that ought to know God, and a conscience that

ought to award to him the supreme juris- | as the animal beneath him. In other words, diction, he lives as effectually without him his atheism, while tasting the bounties of as if he had no mind and no conscience; Providence, is just as complete, as is the and, bating a few transient visitations of atheism of the inferior animals. But theirs thought, and a few regularities of outward proceeds from their incapacity of knowing and mechanical observation, do we behold God. His proceeds from his not liking to man running, and willing, and preparing, retain God in his knowledge. He may and enjoying, just as if there was no other come under the power of godliness, if he portion than the creature-just as if the would. But he chooses rather that the world, and its visible elements, formed the power of sensuality should lord it over all with which he had to do. him, and his whole man is engrossed with the objects of sensuality.

that if this main and originating fountain | abundance among our habitations, and all be, at any time, less copious in its emis- the subordinate magazines formed beside sion, he will have less to draw from it to the wonted stream of liberality, would re his own reservoir; and in that very pro- main empty. But all this is forgotten by the portion will his share of the bounties of vast majority of our unthoughtful and unProvidence be reduced. But stil it is to reflecting species. The patience of God is the well, or receptacle, of his own striking still unexhausted; and the seasons still roll out that he looks, as his main security for in kindly succession over the heads of an the relief of nature's wants, and the abun- ungrateful generation; and that period, dant supply of nature's enjoyments. It is when the machinery of our present sysupon his own work that he depends in this tem shall stop and be taken to pieces has matter, and not on the work or the will of not yet arrived; and that Spirit, who will him who is the author of nature; who not always strive with the children of men, giveth rain from heaven, and fruitful sea- is still prolonging his experiment on the sons, and filleth every heart with food and powers and perversities of our moral nagladness. And thus it is, that the reason ture; and still suspending the edict of disof man, and the retrospective power of solution, by which this earth and these man, still fail to carry him, by an ascend- heavens are at length to pass away. So ing process to the First Cause. He stops that the sun still shines upon us; and the at the instrumental cause, which, by his clouds still drop upon us; and the earth own wisdom and his own power, he has still puts forth the bloom and the beauty put into operation. In a word, the man's of its luxuriance; and all the ministers of understanding is over-run with atheism, as heaven's liberality still walk their annual well as his desires. The intellectual as well round, and scatter plenty over the face of as the sensitive part of his constitution an alienated world; and the whole of naseems to be infected with it. When, like ture continues as smiling in promise, and the instinctive and unreflecting animal, he as sure in fulfilment, as in the days of our engages in the act of direct enjoyment, he forefathers; and out of her large and uniis like it, too, in its atheism. When he versal granary is there, in every returning rises above the animal, and, in the exercise year, as rich a conveyance of aliment as be of his higher and larger faculties, he en- fore, to the populous family in whose begages in the act of providing for enjoyment, half it is opened. But it is the business of he still carries his atheism along with him. many among that population, each to erect A sum of money is, in all its functions, his own separate granary, and to replenish equivalent to such a reservoir. Take one it out of the general store, and to feed himyear with another, and the annual con- self and his dependants out of it. And he sumption of the world cannot exceed the is right in so doing. But he is not right annual produce which issues from the in looking to his own peculiar receptacle, storehouse of him who is the great and the as if it were the first and the emanating bountiful Provider of all its families. The fountain of all his enjoyments. He is not money that is in any man's possession re- right in thus idolising the work of his own presents the share which he can appro- hands-awarding no glory and no confipriate to himself of this produce. If it be dence to him in whose hands is the key a large sum it is like a capacious reservoir of that great storehouse, out of which on the bank of the river of abundance. If every lesser storehouse of man derives its it be laid out on firm and stable securities, fulness. He is not right, in labouring after still it is like a firmly embanked reservoir. the money which purchaseth all things, to The man who toils to increase his money avert the earnestness of his regard from is like a man who toils to enlarge the ca- the Being who provides all things. He is pacity of his reservoir. The man who sus- not right, in thus building his security on pects a flaw in his securities, or who appre- that which is subordinate, unheeding_and hends, in the report of failures and fluctua- unmindful of him who is supreme. It is tions, that his money is all to flow away not right, that silver, and gold, though unfrom him, is like a man who apprehends a shaped into statuary, should still be doing, flaw in the embankments of his reservoir. in this enlightened land, what the images of Paganism once did. It is not right, that they should thus supplant the deference which is owing to the God and the governor of all things-or that each man amongst us should in the secret homage of trust and satisfaction which he renders to his bills, and his deposits, and his deeds of property and possession, endow these various articles with the same moral ascendency over his heart, as the household gods of antiquity had over the idolaters of antiquity

Meanwhile, in all the care that is thus expended, either on the money or on the magazine, the originating source, out of which there is imparted to the one all its real worth, or there is imparted to the other all its real fulness, is scarcely ever thought of. Let God turn the earth into a barren desert, and the money ceases to be convertible to any purpose of enjoyment; or let him lock up that magazine of great and general supply, out of which he showers

making them as effectually usurp the place of the Divinity, and dethrone the one Monarch of heaven and earth from that pre-eminence of trust and of affection that belongs to him.

both for himself and for his children. It matters not for him, that all his enjoyment comes from a primary fountain, and that his wealth is only an intermediate reservoir. It matters not to him, that, if God were to set a seal upon the upper storehouse in heaven, or to blast and to burn up all the fruitfulness of earth, he would reduce, to the worthlessness of dross, all the silver and the gold that abound in it. Still the gold and the silver are his gods. His own fountain is between him and the fountain of original supply. His wealth is be

places, whether in the bank, or in the place of registration, or in the depository of wills and title deeds-these are the sanctuaries of his secret worship-these are the highplaces of his adoration; and never did the devout Israelite look with more intentness towards Mount Zion, and with his face towards Jerusalem, than he does to his wealth, as to the mountain and strong hold of his security. Nor could the Supreme be more effectually deposed from the homage of trust and gratitude than he actually is, though this wealth were recalled from its various investments; and turned into one mass of gold; and cast into a piece of molten statuary; and enshrined on a pedestal, around which all his household might assemble, and make it the ob

He who makes a god of his pleasure, renders to this idol the homage of his senses. He who makes a god of his wealth, renders to this idol the homage of his mind; and he, therefore, of the two, is the more hopeless and determined idolater. The former is goaded on to his idolatry, by the power of appetite. The latter cultivates his with wilful and deliberate per-tween him and God. Its various lodging severance; consecrates his very highest powers to its service; embarks in it, not with the heat of passion, but with the coolness of steady and calculating principle; fully gives up his reason and his time, and all the faculties of his understanding, as well as all the desires of his heart, to the great object of a fortune in this world; makes the acquirement of gain the settled aim, and the prosecution of that aim the settled habit of his existence; sits the whole day long at the post of his ardent and unremitting devotions; and, as he labours at the desk of his counting-house, has his soul just as effectually seduced from the living God to an object distinct from him, and contrary to him, as if the ledger over which he was bending was a book of mystical characters, written in ho-ject of their family devotions; and plied nour of some golden idol placed before him, and with a view to render this idol propitious to himself and to his family. Baal and Moloch were not more substantially the gods of rebellious Israel, than Mammon is the god of all his affections. To the fortune he has reared, or is rearing, for himself and his descendants, he ascribes all the power and all the independence of a divinity. With the wealth he has gotten by his own hands, does he feel himself as independent of God, as the Pagan does, who, happy in the fancied protection of an image made with his own hands, suffers no disturbance to his quiet, from any thought of the real but the unknown Deity. His confidence is in his treasure, and not in God. It is there that he places all his safety and all his sufficiency. It is not on the Supreme Being, conceived in the light of a real and a personal agent, that he places his dependence. It is on a mute and material statue of his own erection. It is wealth, which stands to him in the place of God-to which he awards the credit of all his enjoyments-which he looks to as the emanating fountain of all his present sufficiency-from which he gathers his fondest expectations of all the bright and fancied blessedness that is yet before him-on which he rests as the firmest and stablest foundation of all that the heart can wish or the eye can long after,

every hour of every day with all the fooleries of a senseless and degrading Paganism. It is thus, that God may keep up the charge of idolatry against us, even after all its images have been overthrown. It is thus that dissuasives from idolatry are still addressed, in the New Testament, to the pupils of a new and better dispensation; that little children are warned against idols; and all of us are warned to flee from covetousness, which is idolatry.

To look no further than to fortune as the dispenser of all the enjoyments which money can purchase, is to make that fortune stand in the place of God. It is to make sense shut out faith, and to rob the King eternal and invisible of that supremacy, to which all the blessings of human existence, and all the varieties of human condition, ought, in every instance, and in every particular, to be referred. But, as we have already remarked, the love of money is one affection, and the love of what is purchased by money is another. It was at first, we have no doubt, loved for the sake of the good things which it enabled its possessor to acquire. But whether, as the result of associations in the mind, so rapid as to escape the notice of our own consciousness-or as the fruit of an infection running by the sympathy among all men busily engaged in the prosecution of wealth, as the supreme good of their being-certain it is,

that money, originally pursued for the sake will undergo all the fiercer tortures of the of other things, comes at length to be prized mind; and, instead of employing what they for its own sake. And, perhaps, there is no have, to smooth their passage through the one circumstance which serves more to liken world, will, upon the hazardous sea of adthe love of money to the most irrational of venture, turn the whole of this passage into the heathen idolatries, than that it at length a storm-thus exalting wealth from a serpasses into the love of money for itself; and vant unto a lord, who in return for the hoacquires a most enduring power over the mage that he obtains from his worshippers, human affections, separately altogether from exercises them, like Rehoboam his subjects the power of purchase and of command of old, not with whips but with scorpionswhich belongs to it, over the proper and ori- with consuming anxiety, with never-sated ginal objects of human desire. The first desire, with brooding apprehension, and its thing which set man agoing in the pursuit frequent and ever-flitting spectres, and the of wealth, was that, through it, as an inter-endless jealousies of competition with men vening medium, he found his way to other as intently devoted, and as emulous of a enjoyments; and it proves him, as we have high place in the temple of their common observed, capable of a higher reach of an- idolatry, as themselves. And, without going ticipation than the beast of the field, or the to the higher exhibitions of this propensity, fowls of the air, that he is thus able to cal- in all its rage and in all its restlessness, we culate, and to foresee, and to build up a have only to mark its workings on the walk provision for the wants of futurity. But, of even and every-day citizenship; and mark how soon this boasted distinction of there see, how, in the hearts even of its his faculties is overthrown, and how near most commonplace votaries, wealth is folto each other lie the dignity and the debase-lowed after for its own sake; how, unassoment of the human understanding. If it ciated with all for which reason pronounces evinced a loftier mind in man than in the it to be of estimation, but, in virtue of some inferior animals, that he invented money, mysterious and undefinable charm, opeand by the acquisition of it can both secure rating not on any principle of the judgment, abundance for himself, and transmit this but on the utter perversity of judgment, moabundance to the future generations of his ney has come to be of higher account than family-what have we to offer, in vindica- all that is purchased by money, and has attion of this intellectual eminence, when we tained a rank co-ordinate with that which witness how soon it is, that the pursuit of our Saviour assigns to the life and to the wealth ceases to be rational? How, instead body of man, in being reckoned more than of being prosecuted as an instrument, either meat and more than raiment. Thus making for the purchase of ease, or the purchase of that which is subordinate to be primary, enjoyment, both the ease and enjoyment of and that which is primary subordinate; a whole life are rendered up as sacrifices at transferring, by a kind of fascination, the its shrine? How, from being sought after affections away from wealth in use, to as a minister of gratification to the appetites wealth in idle and unemployed possessionof nature, it at length brings nature into insomuch, that the most welcome intellibondage, and robs her of all her simple de- gence you could give to the proprietor of lights, and pours the infusion of wormwood many a snug deposit, in some place of seinto the currency of her feelings?-making cure and progressive accumulation, would that man sad who ought to be cheerful, and be, that he should never require any part that man who ought to rejoice in his pre- either of it or of its accumulation back sent abundance, filling him either with the again for the purpose of expenditure--and cares of an ambition which never will be that, to the end of his life, every new year satisfied, or with the apprehensions of a dis- should witness another unimpaired addition tress which, in all its pictured and exagge- to the bulk or the aggrandizement of his rated evils, will never be realised. And it is idol. And it would just heighten his enjoywonderful, it is passing wonderful, that ment could he be told, with prophetic cerwealth, which derives all that is true and tainty, that this process of undisturbed augsterling in its worth from its subserviency mentation would go on with his children's to other advantages, should, apart from all children, to the last age of the world; that thought about this subserviency, be made the economy of each succeeding race of the object of such fervent and fatiguing descendants would leave the sum with its devotion. Insomuch, that never did Indian interest untouched, and the place of its sancdevotee inflict upon himself a severer agony tuary unviolated; and, that through a series at the footstool of his Paganism, than those of indefinite generations, would the magnidevotees of wealth who, for its acquire-tude ever grow, and the lustre ever brighten, ment as their ultimate object, will forego of that household god which he had erected all the uses for which alone it is valuable for his own senseless adoration, and bewill give up all that is genuine or tranquil in queathed as an object of as senseless adorathe pleasures of life; and will pierce them- tion to his family. selves through with many sorrows; and

We have the authority of that word which