d speak to you, sir, and say that the Holy
Scriptures declare that money is the root of all evil." I asked him
where he found that saying, and he said he found it in the Bible. I
asked him whether he had made a new Bible, and he said, no, he had not
gotten a new Bible, that it was in the old Bible. "Well," I said, "if it
is in my Bible, I never saw it. Will you please get the text-book and
let me see it?" He left the room and soon came stalking in with his
Bible open, with all the bigoted pride of the narrow sectarian, who
founds his creed on some misinterpretation of Scripture, and he put the
Bible down on the table before me and fairly squealed into my ear,
"There it is. You can read it for yourself." I said to him, "Young man,
you will learn, when you get a little older, that you cannot trust
another denomination to read the Bible for you." I said, "Now, you
belong to another denomination. Please read it to me, and remember that
you are taught in a school where emphasis is exegesis." So he took the
Bible and read it: "The _love_ of money is the root of all evil." Then
he had it right. The Great Book has come back into the esteem and love
of the people, and into the respect of the greatest minds of earth, and
now you can quote it and rest your life and your death on it without
more fear. So, when he quoted right from the Scriptures he quoted the
truth. "The love of money is the root of all evil." Oh, that is it. It
is the worship of the means instead of the end, though you cannot reach
the end without the means. When a man makes an idol of the money instead
of the purposes for which it may be used, when he squeezes the dollar
until the eagle squeals, then it is made the root of all evil. Think, if
you only had the money, what you could do for your wife, your child, and
for your home and your city. Think how soon you could endow the Temple
College yonder if you only had the money and the disposition to give it;
and yet, my friend, people say you and I should not spend the time
getting rich. How inconsistent the whole thing is. We ought to be rich,
because money has power. I think the best thing for me to do is to
illustrate this, for if I say you ought to get rich, I ought, at least,
to suggest how it is done. We get a prejudice against rich men because
of the lies that are told about them. The lies that are told about Mr.
Rockefeller because he has two hundred million dollars--so many believe
them; yet how false is the