cay is
everywhere under the sun, and no matter what the sphere,--high or low,
city or house,--constant diligence alone offsets that tendency.

Ver. 19. The whole is greater than its part. Money can procure both
the feast and the wine; but these are not, even in our preacher's view,
the better things, but the poorer, as chapter vii. has shown us. We,
too, know that which is infinitely higher than feasts and revelry of
earth, and here money avails nothing. "Wine and milk," joy and food,
are here to be bought without money and without price. The currency of
that sphere is not corruptible gold nor silver, but the love that
gives,--sharing all it possesses. There it is love that answereth all
things:--the more excellent way, inasmuch as it covers and is the
spring of all gifts and graces. Without love, the circulating medium
of that new creation, a man is poor indeed,--is worth nothing, nay,
_is_ nothing, (1 Cor. xiii.) He may have the most attractive and showy
of gifts: the lack of love makes the silver tongue naught but empty
sound,--a lack of love makes the deepest understanding naught; and
whilst he may be a very model of what the world falsely calls charity,
giving of his goods to feed the poor, and even his body to be burned,
it is love alone that gives life and substance to it all,--lacking love
it profits nothing. He who abounds most in loving, and consequent
self-emptying, is the richest there. The words of the Lord Jesus in
Luke xii. confirm this: "So is he that layeth up treasure for himself,
and is not rich toward God." The two are in direct contrast. Rich
here--laying up treasure for one's self here--_is_ poverty there, and
the love that gives _is_ divine riches. For he who loves most has
himself drunk deepest into the very nature of God, for God is Love, and
his heart fully satisfied with that which alone in all the universe can
ever satisfy the heart of man, filled up,--surely, therefore,
rich,--pours forth its streams of bounty and blessing according to its
ability to all about. How thoroughly the balances of the sanctuary
reverse the estimation of the world.

But, then, how may we become rich in that true, real sense? To obtain
the money that "answereth all things" under the sun, men _toil_ and
_plan_. Perhaps as the balances of the sanctuary show that selfish
accumulation here is poverty there, so the means of attaining true
riches may be, in some sort, the opposite to those prevailing for t