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.—1 Timothy 6:10.

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 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 Spiritual 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.1 [Note: Archibald Alexander.]

I

The Love of Money

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 with 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 reputations in the dark. For gold they defraud the hireling of his wages, and grind the faces of the poor, and wring the means of personal luxury from rotting houses or infamous pursuits. Gold corrupts trades and professions into that commercial standard which is often little better than systematized dishonesty. Gold can condemn the innocent and shield the guilty.

Plate sin with gold,

And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;

Clothe it with rags, a tiny straw will pierce it.

Look into the history of any civilized nation, analyse with reference to this one cause of crime and misery the lives and thoughts of their nobles, priests, merchants, and men of luxurious life. The sin of the whole world is essentially the sin of Judas. Men do not disbelieve in Christ, but they sell Him.1 [Note: F. W. Farrar, Social and Present-Day Questions, 110.]

Twenty-fifth of ninth month, 1764.—At our Yearly Meeting at Philadelphia this day, John Smith of Marlborough, aged upwards of eighty years, a faithful minister, though not eloquent, stood up in our meeting of ministers and elders and, appearing to be under a great exercise of spirit, informed Friends in substance as follows: “That he had been a member of our Society upwards of sixty years, and he well remembered that, in those early times, Friends were a plain, lowly-minded people, and that there was much tenderness and contrition in their meetings. That, at twenty years from that time, the Society, increasing in wealth, and in some degree conforming to the fashions of the world, true humility was less apparent, and their meetings in general were not so lively and edifying. That at the end of forty years many of them were grown very rich, and many of the Society made a specious appearance in the world: that wearing fine costly garments, and using silver and other watches, became customary with them, their sons, and their daughters. These marks of outward wealth and greatness appeared on some in our meetings of ministers and elders; and, as such things became more prevalent, so the powerful overshadowings of the Holy Ghost were less manifest in the Society. That there had been a continued increase in such ways of life, even until the present time; and that the weakness which hath now overspread the Society and the barrenness manifest among us is matter of much sorrow.”

Friends were incited to constancy in supporting the testimony of truth, and reminded of the necessity which the disciples of Christ are under to attend principally to His business as He is pleased to open it to us, and to be particularly careful to have our minds redeemed from the love of wealth, and our outward affairs in as little room as may be, that no temporal concerns may entangle our affections or hinder us from diligently following the dictates of truth in labouring to promote the pure spirit of meekness and heavenly-mindedness amongst the children of men.1 [Note: The Journal of John Woolman.]

Silver and gold! The snowdrop white

And yellow-blossomed aconite,

Waking from winter’s slumber cold,

Their hoarded treasures now unfold,

And scatter them to left and right.

Ah, with how much more rare delight

Upon my sense their colours smite

Than if my fingers were to hold

Silver and gold.

They bear the superscription bright

Of the great King of love and might,

Who stamped such beauty there of old

That men might learn, as ages rolled,

To trust in God, nor worship quite

Silver and gold.2 [Note: Richard Wilton.]

2. We must remember that it is love of money the Apostle condemns, not money itself. For although avarice is a sin, although the love of money for its own sake is the parent of innumerable evils, yet money, in itself and for the good that we can do with it—either for ourselves, or for those who are immediately dependent on us, or for an ever-widening circle, in proportion as we have the wealth and the opportunity—money thus viewed is not a bad thing but a good thing, and men who daily give the sweat of their brow or the force of their brains to obtain it, and to obtain more of it than they are getting at present, are, generally speaking, not only committing no sin, but simply doing their duty. Their honest industry and application to business is only praiseworthy in God’s sight.

Everyone of us who turns to the pages of the New Testament is constantly brought face to face with the fact that all through Christ regards money as a sacred trust. The accent of Christ is always upon stewardship. He never condemns private property; He assumes it. Indeed, He goes so far as to recognize the duty of accumulation. The man with whom He quarrels is the man who puts his talent in the earth, and does not entrust it to the bank where it may bear its reasonable interest. He recognizes that money is, as the writer of the Ecclesiastes says, a “defence”; and he recognizes at the same time that what it is to the individual or to the society, or to the nations, depends upon the character that is behind it, and the use that is made of these tremendous responsibilities.1 [Note: C. Silvester Horne.]

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 Manicheism. 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.2 [Note: Life of R. W. Dale of Birmingham, by his Son, 145.]

II

The Lover 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 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!1 [Note: F. W. Farrar, Social and Present-Day Questions, 113.]

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, 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.1 [Note: George Eliot, Silas Marner.]

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 covetousness as the years advance. It is a miserable probability. 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 permitted 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.2 [Note: J. A. Kerr Bain, The People of the Pilgrimage, ii. 379.]

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 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 communion 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 consumed 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.

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 forgetfulness. A man’s devotion is apt to dwindle as he becomes more successful. Our piety does not keep pace with our purse. Absorption 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 plentiful, is apt to bring a veil. And the very plentifulness impedes our communion.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, Things That Matter Most (1913), 34.]

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 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 consciousness 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 moral meaning of human experience, 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?1 [Note: R. E. Welsh, Man to Man, 221.]

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.

But when their tales were done,

There spake among them one,

A stranger, seeming from all sorrow free:—

“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.”1 [Note: Frances Browne.]

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.

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 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.1 [Note: A. Plummer, The Pastoral Epistles, 196.]

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 Renaissance 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 Richesse:

Betwixt them both was but a little stride,

That did the House of Richesse from Hell-mouth divide.

It is curious that most moralists confuse avarice with covetousness, 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.2 [Note: Ruskin, Stones of Venice, ii. § 90 (Works, x. 403).]

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 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.

After all, what is wealth? My noble and severe parent had it in goodly quantity, but it cannot be said that it made him happy. He was far from being a happy man. And so it is with many people. I remember when I was a youth at Lû-chow that riches and promotions seemed as very gifts of the Celestial Regions. But I have found that neither great wealth nor distinguished decorations, nor both put together, will guarantee a man against unrest of mind or turmoil of soul. How great and honourable is the Peacock’s Feather of the Throne, yet how much easier rests the head on goose feathers!1 [Note: Memoirs of Li Hung Chang, 210.]

Riches are truly thorns, as the Gospel teaches us. They prick us with a thousand troubles in acquiring them, with more cares in preserving them, and with yet more anxieties in spending them; and, most of all, with vexations in losing them. I know very well how to spend what I have; but if I had more I should be in difficulty as to what to do with it. Am I not happy to live like a child without care? Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. The more any one has to manage the longer the account he has to render. We must make use of this world as though we were making no use of it at all. We must possess riches as though we had them not, and deal with the things of earth like the dogs on the banks of the Nile, who, for fear of the crocodiles, lap up the water of the river as they run along its banks. If, as the wise man tells us, he that addeth knowledge addeth also labour, much more is this the case with the man who heaps up riches. He is like the giants in the fable who piled up mountains, and then buried themselves under them.1 [Note: The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales, 131.]

IV

Deliverance from the Love of Money

1. Let a greater love expel a less, a nobler affection supersede a meaner. Consider often the great things for which we were made, the unsearchable riches of which we have been made partakers in Christ; for covetousness, the desire of having, and of having ever more and more, sin as it is, is yet the degeneration of something which is not a sin. Man was made for the infinite, with infinite longings, infinite cravings and desires. He was intended to find the satisfaction of all these longings, all these desires, in God; ordained by the primal law of his creation to hunger and thirst for God, and to be satisfied only with Him. But averting himself from God, the hunger and the thirst still remain, the sense of emptiness, the yearning after something which he has not got, the desire of having, of filling that immense void within him; and now, because he has refused to fill it with the fulness of God, he seeks to fill it with the fulness of the creature, with ever more and more of this; which, however, do what he will, leaves him dissatisfied and yearning still; for none are truly filled save those whom God satisfies, and satisfies with Himself.

A person who made much profession of living a devout life, was overtaken by sudden misfortune, which deprived her of almost all her wealth and left her plunged in grief. Her distress of mind was so inconsolable that it led her to complain of the Providence of God, who appeared, she said, to have forgotten her. Blessed Francis, anxious to turn her thoughts from the contemplation of herself and of earthly things, to fix them on God, asked her if He was not more to her than anything; nay, if, in fact, God was not Himself everything to her; and if, having loved Him when He had given her many things, she was not now ready to love Him, though she received nothing from Him. She, however, replying that such language was more speculative than practical, and easier to speak than to carry into effect, he wound up by saying with St. Augustine: “Too avaricious is that heart to which God does not suffice.” “Assuredly, he who is not satisfied with God is covetous indeed.” This word covetous produced a powerful effect upon the heart of one who, in the days of her prosperity, had always hated avarice. It seemed as if suddenly the eyes of her soul were opened, and she saw how admirable, how infinitely worthy of love God ever remained, whether with those things she had possessed or without them. So, by degrees, she forgot herself and her crosses; grace prevailed, and she knew and confessed that God was all in all to her.1 [Note: The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales, 49.]

2. Let us share our money with others. The habit of large and liberal giving is a great remedy against covetousness. We do not mean lazy and promiscuous almsgiving, with no pains taken to know whether our gifts are well bestowed—emptying our seedcorn out of the sack’s mouth, instead of carefully scattering it with the hand; for this can do nothing except harm. What we mean is a wise and deliberate dedication to God of a portion of that which came from God. And this portion, if it is really to help us in mortifying the corrupt affection of covetousness, must not be a very small and niggardly one. It must not be that paltry residue which, in most cases, is all that is likely to remain, if indeed anything at all will remain, after every taste, every fancy, every desire of our hearts has been gratified.

Our charities, the offerings which we offer to God, too often cost us nothing, and therefore, as a consequence, they profit us nothing; they help us little or not at all in the way to heaven; nay, rather, in their littleness serve only as an acknowledgment that we recognize a duty which yet we are refusing to fulfil. Some perhaps will say, Better then to withhold this little, if it shall thus prove a witness against us. They may say this; but they cannot in their hearts believe that any true help is here. That help can lie only in so multiplying this little that it may witness not against us but for us; that, like the alms of Cornelius, which, as you will remember, were “much alms,” it may come up for a memorial before God.

On every coin in your possession you may read the letters “D.G.,” by the grace of God. Every coin is yours as the gift of God; as much so as if He had literally placed it on your open palm. If our money is really His, by His gift originally to us, and by our subsequent dedication to Him, surely He ought to have a voice in its expenditure. And the concession of that right to Him would speedily make our consecration real.… Though I do not plead that consecrated Christians should give all away, I do insist upon it, that they should regard all their money as Christ’s, and spend every penny of it beneath His direction, and in harmony with His will. Do not we use the bulk of our Lord’s money for ourselves, giving to Him and His work the chance coins which we may be able to spare, or the subscriptions which we are obliged to give, to maintain a character amongst our fellows?1 [Note: F. B. Meyer.]

Giving is an essential part of the Christian religion. This position needs no special argument. In support of it the whole New Testament cries aloud. The system of redemption is, from first to last, one prodigious process of gift. God loved the world, and gave His only-begotten Son. The Son loved us, and gave Himself to death for us all. This giving does not rest at the point of bounty, but passes on to that of inconceivable sacrifice. Every man on whose spirit the true light of redemption breaks, finds himself heir to a heritage of givings, which began on the eve of time, and will keep pace with the course of eternity. To giving he owes his all; in giving he sees the most substantial evidence he can offer, that he is a grateful debtor; and the self-sacrifice of Him in whom he trusts says, far more pathetically than words could say, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”2 [Note: William Arthur.]

The Love of Money

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); lxv. 81 (J. H. Jowett); lxvi. 213 (C. S. Horne); lxxv. 263 (A. W. Hutton).