ay you will
rise in life; by merely getting money; or by getting wisdom and honour
and virtue. The Psalmists of old, yea our Lord Himself, tell you what
will happen in each case. If you want only to be rich, why then be rich;
if you are clever enough. The Lord may give you what you want, in this
evil world. He may give you your portion in this life, and fill you with
His hid treasure. He may let you heap up money which you do not know how
to spend, and be a laughing-stock to others while you live; and after you
die, your children will probably squander what you have hoarded; while
you will carry away nothing when you die, neither will your pomp follow
you: and take care lest you wake, after all, like Dives in the torment,
to hear the fearful but most reasonable words--"Son, thou in thy lifetime
receivedst thy good things, and therefore thou art tormented." Those
words too, I fear, will come true, in this very generation, of many a
wretched soul who while he lived counted himself a happy man; and had all
men speaking well of him, because he did well unto himself. On whose
souls may God have mercy.
Choose, young men: choose; now in the golden days of youth, and strength,
and honour, ere you have laid a yoke on your own shoulders--even the yoke
of money-worship;--not light and easy, like the yoke of Christ, but
heavier and heavier as the years roll on, while you, with fading
intellect, fading hopes, and it may be fading credit, and certainly
fading power of any rational enjoyment, have still, like the doomed souls
in Dante's Inferno, to roll up hill the money-bags which are perpetually
slipping back. I have seen that, and more than once or twice; and it is,
I think, the saddest sight on earth--save one. Choose, I say again,
then, young men, before you have spread a net round your own feet, which,
as in disturbed dreams, grows and tangles more and more each time you
move--even the net of greed and craft, which men set for their
neighbours; and are but too apt, ere all is done, to be taken in
themselves; the net of truly bad society, of the society of men who have
set their hearts on making money, somehow or other; and with whom, if you
cast in your lot, you may descend--O God, I know full well what I am
saying--to depths from which your young spirits now would shrink; till
your higher nature be subdued to the element in which it works; and the
poet's curse on all who bind themselves to natures lower than their own
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