to grapple it, and it
is just because the heart is there that a thing is the treasure.

Now, I need not do more than remind you, I suppose, that in Scripture
'heart' means a great deal more than it does in our modern usage, for we
employ it as an expression for the affections, whereas the Bible takes
it as including the whole inner man. For instance, we read, 'As a man
_thinketh_ in his heart, so is he'; and of 'the thoughts and intents of
the heart.' So then the affections, as with us, but also thoughts,
purposes, volitions, are all included in the word; and as one passage of
Scripture says, 'Out of it are the issues of life.' It is the central
reservoir, the central personality, the indivisible unit of the
thinking, willing, feeling, loving person which I call 'myself.' So what
Christ says is that where a man's treasure lies, not merely his
affections will twine round it, but his whole self will be, as it were,
implicated and intertwisted with it, so as that what befalls it will
befall him.

Now, further, notice that this saying, so obviously true, is introduced
by a 'for,' and that it is the broad basis on which rest the obligation
and the wisdom of the double counsel which has preceded, on the one
hand, the warning against choosing perishable and uncertain good for our
treasure, and mixing ourselves up with that, and on the other the loving
counsel to choose for ourselves the wealth which is perpetual,
unprecarious, and certain.

So I think we may look at these words from a threefold point of view,
and see in them a mirror that will show us ourselves, a dissuasive and a
persuasive. Let us take these three aspects.

I. Here, then, is a mirror that a man may hold up before himself, and
find out something about himself by it.

For, like other general statements of the same sort, you can turn this
saying round about, and take it the other way, and not only say, as the
text says, 'where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,' but,
'where your heart is, there is your treasure.' A man's real god is the
thing that he counts best, and for which he works most earnestly, and
which, as I said, he most longs to have, and trembles to think he will
lose. That is his god, and his treasure, whatever his professions may
be. Where your heart is, there is your treasure.

Now, of course, for the larger part of the lives of all of us, there are
certain lines laid down by our circumstances, our trades, our various
duties,