that if this main and originating fountain | abundance among our habitations, and al 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 still 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 ás 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 a large sum it is like a capacious reservoir on the bank of the river of abundance. If it be laid out on firm and stable securities, still it is like a firmly embanked reservoir. The man who toils to increase his money is like a man who toils to enlarge the capacity of his reservoir. The man who suspects a flaw in his securities, or who apprehends, in the report of failures and fluctuations, that his money is all to flow away from him, is like a man who apprehends a flaw in the embankments of his reservoir. 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

dence to him in whose hands is the key of that great storehouse, out of which every lesser storehouse of man derives its fulness. He is not right, in labouring after the money which purchaseth all things, to avert the earnestness of his regard from the Being who provides all things. He is not right, in thus building his security on that which is subordinate, unheeding and unmindful of him who is supreme. It is not right, that silver, and gold, though unshaped into statuary, should still be doing, 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

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 foun

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 cul-tain of original supply. His wealth is betivates his with wilful and deliberate per- tween him and God. Its various lodging severance; consecrates his very highest places, whether in the bank, or in the place powers to its service; embarks in it, not of registration, or in the depository of wills with the heat of passion, but with the and title deeds-these are the sanctuaries coolness of steady and calculating princi- of his secret worship-these are the highple; fully gives up his reason and his time, places of his adoration; and never did the and all the faculties of his understanding, devout Israelite look with more intentness as well as all the desires of his heart, to towards Mount Zion, and with his face the great object of a fortune in this world; towards Jerusalem, than he does to his makes the acquirement of gain the settled wealth, as to the mountain and strong hold aim, and the prosecution of that aim the of his security. Nor could the Supreme settled habit of his existence; sits the be more effectually deposed from the howhole day long at the post of his ardent mage of trust and gratitude than he acand unremitting devotions; and, as he la- tually is, though this wealth were recalled bours at the desk of his counting-house, from its various investments; and turned has his soul just as effectually seduced into one mass of gold; and cast into a from the living God to an object distinct piece of molten statuary; and enshrined from him, and contrary to him, as if the on a pedestal, around which all his houseledger over which he was bending was a hold might assemble, and make it the obbook of mystical characters, written in ho-ject of their family devotions; and plied nour of some golden idol placed before every hour of every day with all the him, and with a view to render this idol fooleries of a senseless and degrading Papropitious 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,

ganism. 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,

ON THE LOVE OF MONEY.

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will undergo all the fiercer tortures of the mind; and, instead of employing what they have, to smooth their passage through the world, will, upon the hazardous sea of adventure, turn the whole of this passage into a storm-thus exalting wealth from a servant unto a lord, who in return for the homage that he obtains from his worshippers, exercises them, like Rehoboam his subjects of old, not with whips but with scorpionswith consuming anxiety, with never-sated desire, with brooding apprehension, and its frequent and ever-flitting spectres, and the endless jealousies of competition with men as intently devoted, and as emulous of a high place in the temple of their common idolatry, as themselves. And, without going to the higher exhibitions of this propensity, in all its rage and in all its restlessness, we have only to mark its workings on the walk of even and every-day citizenship; and there see, how, in the hearts even of its most commonplace votaries, wealth is fol

that money, originally pursued for the sake of other things, comes at length to be prized for its own sake. And, perhaps, there is no one circumstance which serves more to liken the love of money to the most irrational of the heathen idolatries, than that it at length passes into the love of money for itself; and acquires a most enduring power over the human affections, separately altogether from the power of purchase and of command which belongs to it, over the proper and original objects of human desire. The first thing which set man agoing in the pursuit of wealth, was that, through it, as an intervening medium, he found his way to other enjoyments; and it proves him, as we have observed, capable of a higher reach of anticipation than the beast of the field, or the fowls of the air, that he is thus able to calculate, and to foresee, and to build up a provision for the wants of futurity. But, mark how soon this boasted distinction of his faculties is overthrown, and how near to 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

some magical power of its own, has gotten the ascendency, then still it is followed after as the supreme good; and there is an actual supplanting of the living God. He is robbed of the gratitude that we owe him for our daily sustenance; for, instead of receiving it as if it came direct out of his hand, we receive it as if it came from the hand of a secondary agent, to whom we ascribe all the stability and independence of God. This wealth, in fact, obscures to us the character of God, as the real though unseen Author of our various blessings; and as if by a material intervention does it hide from the perception of nature, the hand which feeds, and clothes, and maintains us in life, and in all the comforts and necessaries of life.

has been pronounced a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart, that it cannot have two masters, or that there is not room in it for two great and ascendent affections. The engrossing power of one such affection is expressly affirmed of the love for Mammon, or the love for money thus named and characterised as an idol. Or, in other words, if the love of money be in the heart, the love of God is not there. If a man be trusting in uncertain riches, he is not trusting in the living God, who giveth us all things richly to enjoy. If his heart be set upon covetousness, it is set upon an object of idolatry. The true divinity is moved away from his place, and, worse than atheism, which would only leave it empty, has the love of wealth raised another di-It just has.the effect of thickening still more vinity upon his throne. So that covetousness offers a more daring and positive aggression on the right and territory of the Godhead, than even infidelity. The latter would only desolate the sanctuary of heaven; the former would set up an abomination in the midst of it. It not only strips God of love and of confidence, which are his prerogatives, but it transfers them to another. And little does the man who is proud in honour, but, at the same time, proud and peering in ambition-little does he think, that, though acquitted in the eye of all his fellows, there still remains an atrocity of a deeper character than even that of atheism, with which he is chargeable. Let him just take an account of his mind, amid the labours of his merchandise, and he will find that the living God has no ascendency there; but that wealth, just as much as if personified into life, and agency, and power, wields over him all the ascendency of God. Where his treasure is, his And to advert, for one moment, to the heart is also; and, linking as he does his misery of this affection, as well as to its main hope with its increase, and his main sinfulness. He, over whom it reigns, feels fear with its fluctuations and its failures, a worthlessness in his present wealth, after he has effectually dethroned the Supreme it is gotten; and when to this we add the from his heart, and deified an usurper restlessness of a yet unsated appetite, lordin his room, as if fortune had been embo-ing it over all his convictions, and panting died into a goddess, and he were in the habit of repairing, with a crowd of other worshippers, to her temple. She, in fact, is the dispenser of that which he chiefly prizes in existence. A smile from her is worth all the promises of the Eternal, and her threatening frown more dreadful to the imagination than all his terrors.

And the disease is as near to universal as it is virulent. Wealth is the goddess whom all the world worshippeth. There is many a city in our empire, of which, with an eye of apostolical discernment, it may be seen that it is almost wholly given over to idolatry. If a man look no higher than to his money for his enjoyments, then money is his god. It is the god of his dependence, and the god upon whom his heart is staid. Or if, apart from other enjoyments, it by

that impalpable veil which lies between God and the eye of the senses. We lose all discernment of him as the giver of our comforts; and coming, as they appear to do, from that wealth which our fancies have raised into a living personification, does this idol stand before us, not as a deputy but as a substitute for that Being, with whom it is that we really have to do. All this goes both to widen and to fortify that disruption which has taken place between God and the world. It adds the power of one great master idol to the seducing influence of all the lesser idolatries. When the liking and the confidence of men are towards money, there is no direct intercourse, either by the one or the other of these affections towards God; and, in proportion as he sends forth his desires, and rests his security on the former, in that very proportion does he renounce God as his hope, and God as his dependence.

for more; when, to the dullness of his actual satisfaction in all the riches that he has, we add his still unquenched, and, indeed, unquenchable desire for the riches that he has not; when we reflect that as, in the pursuit of wealth, he widens the circle of his operations, so he lengthens out the line of his open and hazardous exposure, and multiplies, along the extent of it, those vulnerable points from which another and another dart of anxiety may enter into his heart; when he feels himself as if floating on an ocean of contingency, on which, perhaps, he is only borne up by the breath of a credit that is fictitious, and which, liable to burst every moment, may leave him to sink under the weight of his overladen speculation; when suspended on the doubtful result of his bold and uncertain adventure,

he dreads the tidings of disaster in every | formidable of his wiles. And whatever may arrival, and lives in a continual agony of be the instrument of reclaiming men from feeling, kept up by the crowd and turmoil of this delusion, it certainly is not any arguhis manifold distractions, and so overspread- ment either about the shortness of life, or ing the whole compass of his thoughts, as to the certainty and awfulness of its approachleave not one narrow space for the thought ing termination. On this point man is caof eternity;—will any beholder just look to pable of a stout-hearted resistance, even to the mind of this unhappy man, thus tost ocular demonstration; nor do we know a and bewildered and thrown into a general more striking evidence of the bereavement unceasing frenzy, made out of many fears which must have passed upon the human and many agitations, and not to say, that faculties, than to see how, in despite of the bird of the air, which sends forth its un- arithmetic,-how, in despite of manifold reflecting song, and lives on the fortuitous experience,-how, in despite of all his gabounty of Providence, is not higher in the thering wrinkles, and all his growing infirscale of enjoyment than he? And how mities,-how, in despite of the ever-lessenmuch more, then, the quiet Christian beside ing distance between him and his sepulchre, him, who, in possession of food and rai- and of all the tokens of preparation for the ment has that godliness with contentment onset of the last messenger, with which, in which is great gain-who, with the peace the shape of weakness, and breathlessness, of heaven in his heart, and the glories of and dimness of eyes, he is visited; will the heaven in his eye, has found out the true feeble and asthmatic man still shake his philosophy of existence; has sought a por- silver locks in all the glee and transport of tion where alone a portion can be found, which he is capable, when he hears of his and, in bidding away from his mind the gainful adventures, and his new accumulalove of money, has bidden away all the tions. Nor can we tell how near he must cross and all the carefulness along with it. get to his grave, or how far on he must adDeath will soon break up every swelling vance in the process of dying, ere gain enterprise of ambition, and put upon it a cease to delight, and the idol of wealth most cruel and degrading mockery. And cease to be dear to him. But when we see it is, indeed, an affecting sight, to behold the that the topic is trade and its profits, which workings of this world's infatuation among lights up his faded eye with the glow of its so many of our fellow mortals nearing and chiefest ecstacy, we are as much satisfied nearing every day to eternity, and yet, in- that he leaves the world with all his treastead of taking heed to that which is before sure there, and all the desires of his heart them, mistaking their temporary vehicle for there, as if acting what is told of the miser's their abiding home-and spending all their death-bed, he made his bills and his parchtime and all their thought upon its accom- ments of security the companions of his modations. It is all the doing of our great bosom, and the last movements of his life adversary, thus to invest the trifles of a day were a fearful, tenacious, determined grasp, in such characters of greatness and dura- of what to him formed the all for which bility; and it is, indeed, one of the most life was valuable.