ot earned it; it cannot be his, because
his services have already been paid; but year by year it is his to
distribute, whether to help individuals whose birthright and outfit have
been swallowed up in his, or to further public works and institutions.

At this rate, short of inspiration, it seems hardly possible to be both
rich and honest; and the millionaire is under a far more continuous
temptation to thieve than the labourer who gets his shilling daily for
despicable toils. Are you surprised? It is even so. And you repeat it
every Sunday in your churches. "It is easier for a camel to pass through
the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." I
have heard this and similar texts ingeniously explained away and brushed
from the path of the aspiring Christian by the tender Greatheart of the
parish. One excellent clergyman told us that the "eye of a needle" meant
a low, Oriental postern through which camels could not pass till they
were unloaded--which is very likely just; and then went on, bravely
confounding the "kingdom of God" with heaven, the future paradise, to
show that of course no rich person could expect to carry his riches
beyond the grave--which, of course, he could not and never did. Various
greedy sinners of the congregation drank in the comfortable doctrine
with relief. It was worth the while having come to church that Sunday
morning! All was plain. The Bible, as usual, meant nothing in
particular; it was merely an obscure and figurative school-copybook; and
if a man were only respectable, he was a man after God's own heart.

Alas! I fear not. And though this matter of a man's services is one for
his own conscience, there are some cases in which it is difficult to
restrain the mind from judging. Thus I shall be very easily persuaded
that a man has earned his daily bread; and if he has but a friend or two
to whom his company is delightful at heart, I am more than persuaded at
once. But it will be very hard to persuade me that any one has earned an
income of a hundred thousand. What he is to his friends, he still would
be if he were made penniless to-morrow; for as to the courtiers of
luxury and power, I will neither consider them friends, nor indeed
consider them at all. What he does for mankind there are most likely
hundreds who would do the same, as effectually for the race and as
pleasurably to themselves, for the merest fraction of this monstrous
wage. Why it is paid, I am, therefor