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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 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

has been pronounced a discerner of the some magical power of its own, has gotten thoughts and intents of the heart, that it the ascendency, then still it is followed after cannot have two masters, or that there is as the supreme good; and there is an actual not room in it for two great and ascendent supplanting of the living God. He is robaffections. The engrossing power of one bed of the gratitude that we owe him for such affection is expressly affirmed of the our daily sustenance; for, instead of receivlove for Mammon, or the love for money ing it as if it came direct out of his hand, thus named and characterised as an idol. we receive it as if it came from the hand of Or, in other words, if the love of money be a secondary agent, to whom we ascribe all in the heart, the love of God is not there. the stability and independence of God. This If a man be trusting in uncertain riches, he wealth, in fact, obscures to us the character is not trusting in the living God, who giveth of God, as the real though unseen Author us all things richly to enjoy. If his heart of our various blessings; and as if by a matebe set upon covetousness, it is set upon an rial intervention does it hide from the perobject of idolatry. The true divinity is ception of nature, the hand which feeds, moved away from his place, and, worse than and clothes, and maintains us in life, and atheism, which would only leave it empty, in all the comforts and necessaries of life. has the love of wealth raised another di- It just has the effect of thickening still more vinity upon his throne. So that covetous-that impalpable veil which lies between God ness 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 ascend-dependence. ency 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

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

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,

formidable of his wiles. And whatever may be the instrument of reclaiming men from this delusion, it certainly is not any argument either about the shortness of life, or the certainty and awfulness of its approaching termination. On this point man is ca

he dreads the tidings of disaster in every arrival, and lives in a continual agony of feeling, kept up by the crowd and turmoil of his manifold distractions, and so overspreading the whole compass of his thoughts, as to leave not one narrow space for the thought of eternity;-will any beholder just look topable 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.

A SERMON,

PREACHED IN ST. ANDREW'S CHURCH EDINBURGH,

BEFORE

THE SOCIETY

FOR

THE RELIEF OF THE DESTITUTE SICK,

APRIL 18, 1813.

"Blessed is he that considereth the poor; the Lord will deliver him in time of trouble."-Psalm xli. 1. THERE is an evident want of congeniality | respect is greatly impaired, since the wisbetween the wisdom of this world, and the wisdom of the Christian. The term "wisdom," carries my reverence along with it. It brings before me a grave and respectable character, whose rationality predominates over the inferior principles of his constitution, and to whom I willingly yield that peculiar homage which the enlightened, and the judicious, and the manly, are sure to exact from a surrounding neighbourhood. Now, so long as this wisdom has for its object some secular advantage, I yield it an unqualified reverence. It is a reverence which all understand, and all sympathize with. If, in private life, a man be wise in the management of his farm, or his fortune, or his family; or if, in public life, he have wisdom to steer an empire through all its difficulties, and to carry it to aggrandizement and renown-the respect which I feel for such wisdom as this, is most cordial and entire, and supported by the universal acknowledgment of all whom I call to attend to it.

dom of the man has taken so unaccountable a change in its object and in its direction? The truth is, that the greater part of the world feel no respect at all for a wisdom which they do not comprehend. They may love the innocence of a decidedly religious character, but they feel no sublime or commanding sentiment of veneration for its wisdom. All the truth of the Bible, and all the grandeur of eternity, will not redeem it from a certain degree of contempt. Terms which lower, undervalue, and degrade, suggest themselves to the mind; and strongly dispose it to throw a mean and disagreeable colouring over the man who, sitting loose to the objects of the world, has become altogether a Christian. It is needless to expatiate; but what I have seen myself, and what must have fallen under the observation of many whom I address, carry in them the testimony of experience to the assertion of the Apostle, "that the things of the Spirit of God are foolishness to the natural man, neither can he know them, for they are spiritually discerned."

Let me now suppose that this wisdom has changed its object-that the man whom I Now, what I have said of the respectable am representing to exemplify this respecta-attribute of wisdom, is applicable, with alble attribute, instead of being wise for time, most no variation, to another attribute of the is wise for eternity-that he labours by the human character, to which I would assign faith and sanctification of the gospel for un- the gentler epithet of "lovely." The attriperishable honours-that, instead of listen-bute to which I allude, is that of benevoing to him with admiration at his sagacity, lence. This is the burden of every poet's as he talks of business, or politics, or agri- song, and every eloquent and interesting culture, we are compelled to listen to him enthusiast gives it his testimony. I speak talking of the hope within the veil, and of not of the enthusiasm of methodists and deChrist being the power of God, and the wis-votees-I speak of that enthusiasm of fine dom of God, unto salvation. What becomes of your respect for him now? Are there not some of you who are quite sensible that this

sentiment which embellishes the pages of elegant literature, and is addressed to all her sighing and amiable votaries, in the various

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