that a demon,
if he saw his own reflection in a mirror, would fly. I think if some of
us professing Christians saw ourselves, as the looking-glass of my text
might give us to see ourselves, we should shudderingly depart from that
self, and seek to have a better self formed within us. 'Where your
treasure is, there will your heart be also.'

II. Now let me ask you to look at this saying, in the connection in
which our Lord adduced it, as being a dissuasive.

He applies it to both branches of His previous advice. He had just said,
'Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth
corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.' These are very
primitive methods of depriving men of their treasures, arguing a
comparatively simple state of society. The moth is that which destroys
wealth in garments, which was a great part of ancient Eastern wealth.
Rust rather means corrosion, or corruption, and applies to the other
great kind of primitive wealth, in food and the stores of the harvest.
And the thieves who dig through the mud wall of the house, and carry
away the owners' little hoard of gold and silver, point also to a
primitive condition of society. But whatever may be the special force of
these different words, they suggest to us this, that all that is here
has its own particular and special enemy which wars against its
permanence. There are _bacteria_ of all sorts, every vegetable has its
own kind. Every growth has to fear the gnawing of some foe. And so every
treasure that I can gather into my heart, excepting one, is threatened
by some kind of danger.

No man can have lived as long in a great commercial community, as some
of us have done, without knowing that there are a great many besides
professional and so-called thieves in it, that take away the gold and
silver. How many instances I can look back upon, of lords of the
exchange and magnates of trade, who carved their names, as they thought,
in imperishable marble on the doors of their warehouses, and then became
bankrupt and fugitive, and were lost sight of. We all know the
uncertainty of riches.

And are the other kinds of treasure that we cleave to more reliable?
Have they not their moths and their rusts? Is it pleasure? Well, I say
nothing about the diseases that fill the bones of many a young man who
flings himself into dissipation; but I remind you of just this one
thing, that all that pleasure tends to become flat, stale, and
unprof