eeble prayer of ours,
Transmuted into wealth unpriced,
By Him who giveth thus
The glory all to Jesus Christ,
The gladness all to us!"[29]

Money

Limitations.
The Best Partnership.
Jesus' Teaching.
Be Your Own Executor.
Missing the Master's Meaning.
Money Talks.
Debts.
Rusty Money.
Are We True to Our Friend's Trust?

Money

<u>Limitations.</u>

Money seems almost almighty in its power to do things, and make changes.
It can make a desert blossom as a rose. It can even defy death. Medical
skill holds the life here that otherwise would have been snuffed out.
Great buildings go up. Colleges begin their life with apparatus and books,
skilled instructors, and eager students. Mammoth enterprises spring into
being. Hospitals and churches rise up with skilled attendants and talented
preachers.

We have come, in our day, and perhaps peculiarly in our country, to think
that there is no limit to the power of money. Our ideas of its value are
really greatly exaggerated. That first sentence I used would be revised by
many to read, "Money is almighty." The cautious words "seems" and "almost"
would be promptly cut out.

Yet money has great limitations. It will help greatly to remember what
they are. And many of us need the brain-clearing of that help. Of itself
money is utterly useless, so much dead-weight stuff lying useless and
helpless. It must have human hands to make it valuable. It gets its value
from our conception of its value and from our use of it. It must have a
human partner to be of any service at all.

In bad hands it becomes devilish in its badness. And I needn't put an
"almost" in that sentence. It may be as a very demon, or as the arch-devil
himself, as really as it may seem to be divine in its creative and
changing power.

Then it is valuable only in this world, on the earth. At the line of death
its value wholly ceases. Over that line it takes its place as a pauper. It
is represented as being used for cobble stones in the streets of the new
Jerusalem. Yet it would need to go through some hardening process to make
it of any account at all as paving material.

We ought to remind ourselves of something else, too, that the crowd
constantly forgets, and that we are tempted to forget when touched by the
contagion of the crowd. And that is, that money is always less in its
power than a strong, sweet, pure life. Maybe you think that comparison
c