his money
dishonestly. He had made it honestly, every dollar of it.

Nor was he a fool because he set about thoughtfully to save what he had
made. The Bible sets no premium upon wastefulness. God lets us know
that to waste anything of value is not only foolish but wicked. What
was the sin of the Prodigal Son? It was this, that he "wasted his
substance with riotous living." He spent his treasure without getting
any adequate return.

That is the tragedy of a great number of us. I do not charge you with
outrageous and disgraceful wickedness. But it is true that you are not
investing your life in the highest possible way. You are squandering
yourself on things of secondary value. And to you God is speaking as
he spoke centuries ago: "Wherefore do you spend your money for that
which is not meat and your labor for that which satisfieth not?" You
have no right to waste yourself and you have just as little right to
waste your money which represents a part of yourself.

No, the foolishness of this man was not in the fact that he sought to
save what he had made. That is right. That is sensible. To do
otherwise is at once wicked and little. Big things do not waste. This
is a big world on which we live but it has never lost one single drop
of water nor one single grain of sand since God flung it into space.
And even Jesus Christ himself, the Lord of the universe, commanded His
disciples after He had fed the multitude, to gather up the fragments
that nothing be lost.

Why then, I repeat, does Christ call this man a fool? His foolishness
lay fundamentally in the fact that he was a practical atheist. He had
absolutely no sense of God. He lived as if the fact of God were an
absolute lie. I do not think for a moment that he claimed to be an
atheist. I have no doubt that he was altogether orthodox. I have no
doubt that he went to the synagogue or to the temple every Sabbath day.
But practically he was an utter atheist. And what is true of him is
equally true of many another man who stands up every Sunday in Church
to recite his creed.

How do we know that he is an atheist? We know it by hearing him think.
Listen: "He thought within himself." Now then we are going to get to
see this man as he really is. You can't always tell what a man is by
the way he looks. He may look like the flower, but be the serpent
under it. He may smile and smile, as Hamlet tells us, and be a
villain. You can't always tell what