y wrong when
carried to an extreme, is the love of money. The love of money up to a
certain point is a necessity; beyond that it may become one of the worst
of sins. Christ said: "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon." The two
services, at a definite point, become incompatible, and hence
correspondence with one must cease. At what point, however, it must
cease each man has to determine for himself. And in this consists at
once the difficulty and the dignity of Limitation.

There is another class of cases where the adjustments are still more
difficult to determine. Innumerable points exist in our surroundings
with which it is perfectly legitimate to enjoy, and even to cultivate,
correspondence, but which privilege, at the same time, it were better on
the whole that we did not use. Circumstances are occasionally such--the
demands of others upon us, for example, may be so clamant--that we have
voluntarily to reduce the area of legitimate pleasure. Or, instead of
it coming from others, the claim may come from a still higher direction.
Man's spiritual life consists in the number and fullness of his
correspondences with God. In order to develop these he may be
constrained to insulate them, to inclose them from the other
correspondences, to shut himself in with them. In many ways the
limitation of the natural life is the necessary condition of the full
enjoyment of the spiritual life.

In this principle lies the true philosophy of self-denial. No man is
called to a life of self-denial for its own sake. It is in order to a
compensation which, though sometimes difficult to see, is always real
and always proportionate. No truth, perhaps, in practical religion is
more lost sight of. We cherish somehow a lingering rebellion against the
doctrine of self-denial--as if our nature, or our circumstances, or our
conscience, dealt with us severely in loading us with the daily cross.
But is it not plain after all that the life of self-denial is the more
abundant life--more abundant just in proportion to the ampler
crucifixion of the narrower life? Is it not a clear case of exchange--an
exchange however where the advantage is entirely on our side? We give up
a correspondence in which there is a little life to enjoy a
correspondence in which there is an abundant life. What though we
sacrifice a hundred such correspondences? We make but the more room for
the great one that is left. The lesson of self-denial, that is to say of
Limitation, is _conc