s head on her shield, and makes you every day think
worse of yourself.

Worse in two ways, also, more's the pity. It is perpetually increasing
the personal sense of ignorance and the personal sense of fault. And
this last is the truth which is at the bottom of the common
evangelical notion about conversion, and which the Devil has got hold
of, and hidden, until, instead of seeing and confessing personal
ignorance and fault, as compared with the sense and virtue of others,
people see nothing but corruption in human nature, and shelter their
own sins under accusation of their race (the worst of all assertions
of equality and fraternity). And so they avoid the blessed and
strengthening pain of finding out wherein they are fools, as compared
with other men, by calling everybody else a fool too; and avoid the
pain of discerning their own faults, by vociferously claiming their
share in the great capital of original sin.

I must also, therefore, tell you here what properly ought to have
begun the next following section of our subject--the point usually
unnoticed in the parable of the Prodigal Son.

174. First, have you ever observed that all Christ's main teachings,
by direct order, by earnest parable, and by His own permanent emotion,
regard the use and misuse of _money_? We might have thought, if we had
been asked what a divine teacher was most likely to teach, that he
would have left inferior persons to give directions about money; and
himself spoken only concerning faith and love, and the discipline of
the passions, and the guilt of the crimes of soul against soul. But
not so. He speaks in general terms of these. But He does not speak
parables about them for all men's memory, nor permit Himself fierce
indignation against them, in all men's sight. The Pharisees bring Him
an adulteress. He writes her forgiveness on the dust of which He had
formed her. Another, despised of all for known sin, He recognized as a
giver of unknown love. But He acknowledges no love in buyers and
sellers in His house. One should have thought there were people in
that house twenty times worse than they;--Caiaphas and his like--false
priests, false prayer-makers, false leaders of the people--who needed
putting to silence, or to flight, with darkest wrath. But the scourge
is only against the _traffickers and thieves_. The two most intense of
all the parables: the two which lead the rest in love and terror (this
of the Prodigal, and of Dives), relat