Job 31:24-28 If I have made gold my hope, or have said to the fine gold, You are my confidence; What is the true idea of property — something to be left behind when we die, or something which may be interwoven with our immortal nature, and so will last us for eternity? Money, jewels, lands, houses, books, decorations of all sorts and kinds, must be taken leave of at the bed of death. But there are things that last. Habits are wrought into the intellect and will — the love of God and of man, sincerity, purity, disinterestedness, these things live, and are really property, for death cannot touch them. Most men regard civilisation as mere material progress; but true human improvement must be an improvement of the man himself. And man himself is not what he owns and can handle, nor even his bodily frame, but he is a spirit clothed in a bodily form. His real improvement consists in that which secures the freedom and the supremacy of the noblest part of his nature. A true civilisation is that which shall promote this upon a great scale in human society. What do we see every year as the London season draws near, but a bevy of mothers, like generals, set out on a campaign, prepared to undergo any amount of fatigue if only they can marry their daughters, not necessarily to high-souled, virtuous men, but in any ease to a fortune! What do we see but a group of young men, thinking, after perhaps a career of dissipation, that the time has arrived for settling respectably in life, and looking, each one of them, not for a girl who has the graces and character which will make her husband and children happy, but for somebody who has a sufficient dowry to enable him to keep up a large establishment! Who can wonder, when the most sacred of all human relations, the union of hearts for time and for eternity, is thus prostituted to the brutal level of an affair of cash, that such transactions are quickly followed by months or years of misery — misery which, after seething long in private, is at last paraded before the eyes of the wondering world amid the unspeakable shame and degradation of the Divorce Court! (Canon Liddon.) Parallel Verses KJV: If I have made gold my hope, or have said to the fine gold, Thou art my confidence;WEB: "If I have made gold my hope, and have said to the fine gold, 'You are my confidence;' |
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