itable. That which the poet said of his own class, that it 'begins
in gladness, and thereof cometh in the end despondency and madness,' is
true of every delight of sense, ay! and of more than sense, of taste
and of intellect. As the Book of Proverbs has it, 'the end of that mirth
is heaviness.'

Brethren, the moth and the rust claim as their prey all treasures except
one. Is it love-pure, blessed, soul-filling, soul-resting as it is? Yes,
and on a hundred walls in any city there hangs, and in a thousand hearts
there hangs, that great picture where the feeble form of Love is trying
to repel from entrance into the rose-covered portal of the home the
inevitable and mighty shrouded form of Death. Is it culture? 'Whether
there be tongues they shall cease; whether there be knowledge it shall
vanish away.' The last illuminator and teacher, which is Death,
antiquates and brushes aside, as of no use in the new conditions, most
of the knowledge which men, wisely in a measure, but foolishly if
exclusively, have sought to acquire for themselves here below.

And when the moth and the rust come, and the separating, bony fingers of
the skeleton Death filch away at last your treasure, what about you who
are wrapped up with it, implicated in it; so grown into it, and it into
you, that to wrench you from it opens your veins, and you bleed to
death? There is a pathetic inscription in one of the rural churches of
this country, in which two parents record the death of their only child,
and add, 'All our hopes were in this frail bark, and the shipwreck is
total.' I have heard of a man that might have been saved from a
foundering ship, but he lashed his money-bags round him, and he sank
along with them. 'Where your treasure is, there will your heart be
also,' pierced by all the wounds, gnawed by all the moths, rotted by all
the corruption that affects it, and when the thief, the last great thief
of all, comes, you will only have to say, 'They have taken away my
gods, and what have I more?' And the answer out of the waste places of
an echoing universe will be, 'Nothing! Nothing!'

III. Now, lastly, let me show you the persuasive in my text.

'Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,' therefore, says
Christ, 'lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth
nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and
steal.' If my treasure is in heaven it is secure. And oh! brethren, we
need for our blessednes