meagre, less
animal, less dull."[50] Do not let us speak as though the only friends
of the poor were those who gave them oatmeal at Christmas, or who secure
for them alms-houses in their old age. There is a life which is more
than meat, and all heavenly charity is not to be bound up in bags of
flour. He who strives to bring into the grey, monotonous lives of the
toilers of our great cities the sweet, refining influences of art, and
music and literature, he who helps his fellows to see and to love the
true and the beautiful and the good, is not one whit less a benefactor
of his kind than he who obtains for them better food and better homes.
Man shall not live by bread alone, and they who use their wealth to
minister to a higher life serve us not less really than they who provide
for our physical needs.

III

Much, however, as Christ has to say concerning the noble uses to which
wealth may be put, it is not here, as every reader of the Gospels must
feel, that the full emphasis of His words comes. It is when He goes on
to speak of the perils of the rich, and of our wrong estimates of the
worth of wealth, that His solemn warnings pierce to the quick. Christ
did not live, nor does He call us to live, in an unreal world, though
perhaps there are few subjects concerning which more unreal words have
been spoken than this. The power of wealth is great, the power of
consecrated wealth is incalculably great; and this the New Testament
freely recognizes; but wealth is _not_ the great, necessary,
all-sufficing thing that ninety-nine out of a hundred of us believe it
to be. And when we put it first, and make it the standard by which all
things else are to be judged, Christ tells us plainly that we are
falling into a temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful
lusts; we are piercing ourselves through with many sorrows. For once at
least, then, let us try to look at money with His eyes and to weigh it
in His balances.

Christ was Himself a poor man. His mother was what to-day we should call
a working-man's wife, and probably also the mother of a large family.
When, as an infant, Jesus was presented in the Temple, the offering
which His parents brought was that which the law prescribed in the case
of the poor: "a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons." When He came
to manhood, and entered on His public ministry, He had no home He could
call His own. In His Father's house, He said, were many mansions; but on
ea