Battles to Fight

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1. Money And Morals



" When a man dies, they who survive him ask what property he has left behind him. The angel who bends over the dying man asks what good deeds he has sent before him.'' - The Koran.

" It is physically impossible for a well-educated, intellectual, or brave man to make money the chief object of his thoughts.'''' - Ruskin.

It seems a strange combination ! Is there any connection between money and morals ? If there is it is the connection which exists between the neck of the criminal and the axe of the executioner - a connection that is, as a rule, hopelessly and absolutely fatal. The reckless greed of gain has driven more men away from Jesus Christ than any other passion. "Very sorrowful . . . for he was very rich." That is a miniature portrait of a young man who once came to Christ, and it tells the story of many a prosperous but dissatisfied man to-day. Have you ever known any man who received the slightest benefit of a high and noble kind from money ? Has it ever made a man good ? Has it ever increased his generosity, broadened his sympathies, or roused in him a longing after righteousness? Never I It adds to your creature comforts, ministers to your merely sensuous enjoyment; if you possess brains it enables you to encourage art and science, and if you are a practical Christian it places in your hand the wherewithal to succor the suffering and reheve the distressed. But in itself money has never made any man happy or healthy or holy. On the contrary, it has dimmed the love, wrecked the peace, and spoilt the characters of countless thousands. One of the ablest preachers of the day, speaking recently, said that " nothing but the mercy of God prevented money from doing harm wherever it went."

Don't you think it is a very impressive and significant fact that the most heartless and contemptible act of treachery ever committed - an act which has excited the horror and disgust of all the ages - should have been due to the selfish desire of a miserable and covetous man to secure thirty pieces of silver? Judas Iscariot was not a degraded profligate - he was a disciple, with a character, no doubt, of the utmost decency and respectability. He may have been alluded to, for all we know, as a shrewd, practical, hard-headed man of business. But it was that little bag of money which led to his sin, his suicide, and his destruction. His love of gain was greater than his love for his Lord.

And this is just where the danger exists. Young men will exclaim, " Surely it is not wrong to wish to make money?" Certainly not, if you are careful that when you have made the money it does not mar you. Riches are like a rose in a man's hand; if he holds it gently it will preserve its beauty of shape and fragrance of smell, but if he handles it tightly he will crush and destroy it. Make your pile of money if you will - work on with earnestness, industry, and persistence, and may large success attend all your endeavors. But bear with this brotherly warning. Hold the riches lightly - let them flow out freely in wise benevolence, use them liberally for the highest ends, and you will have done well. But hug your wealth, set your heart on it, let the miserly and covetous spirit paralyze your very soul, and life will become a hideous nightmare, a foul sepulchre, a long spell of hopeless servitude.

Do you doubt this? Then listen to the testimony of a man who made money with great rapidity and got rid of it with equal celerity. " I have never seen the use of hoarding money," said George Moore; "we may gather riches, but can never know who is to spend them. God preserve me against the sin of covetousness. It is a curse that eats out the heart and dries up the soul of a man." Have we not all seen the man who is rich and wretched? He has given up his life to the pursuit of wealth, and in so doing the man has been utterly lost in the machine. When his bank-book bulges out with untold riches, he finds that it is impossible to enjoy them. He has cultivated no lofty tastes, formed no healthy habits, indulged in no Christly beneficence, and so the money is nothing but an intolerable burden, and all he can do is to go on raking, and reckoning, and grinding, and fighting for gold that he does not want, and which he does not know how to use when it is acquired.

Beware of this reckless and ruinous ambition for wealth. Remember the words of Goethe -

Men may bear much from harsh severity, But not a long run of unmixed prosperity!

Riches are like thorns - touch them tenderly and lightly and they are harmless ; rest on them and they will cut and rend and pierce you. Therefore do not allow your mind to be muddled and your life to be unsettled by a vain desire for a big bank balance. "A restlessness in men's minds," says Sir William Temple, " to be something they are not, and to have something they have not, is the root of all immorality." That is profoundly and terribly true. We forget that a good farthing is better than a bad sovereign, and that it is far more manly to do the best we can with our own feathers than to strut in borrowed plumes. Why should we be so anxious for the gilded shams and sparkling mockeries of the world ? Is a man's heart more restful because his head is adorned with a coronet ? Does his Hfe gain in buoyancy because he keeps more horses than he can ride ? What nonsense it all is ! Instead of spoiling your life by any mad ambition for personal aggrandizement, do the present duty manfully and well. After all that is the surest road to prosperity. And if you have sufficient grit in you to stand the overwhelming temptations of riches, they may be bestowed on you one of these days, and then you will wonder how you could ever have wasted a single moment in longing for so fleeting and superficial a possession. But never allow the devil to make you morbidly discontented with your environment. If he once does that, he can work your ruin without much further trouble. "You were meant," he will say, " for something better than this monotonous toil ; get gold and plenty of it, put on fine airs, and help to swell the mob of fashionable pleasure-seekers ; live for sensual delights, smother your conscience with bank-notes, and laugh at the puritanical ravings of modern faddists and philanthropic cranks." The man who is caught by this temptation seldom escapes. He gambles and plunges furiously, and tries to get rich by rapid and unrighteous means. He becomes selfish and cynical and dishonest, winks at falsehood, laughs at license, is unscrupulous in his passion for wealth and position, and, almost without knowing it, the poor fellow has sunk into the uttermost depths of cowardice and vice. There is, however, an ambition which is noble and commendable, but it is ruled by love, guarded by honesty, and sanctified by a generous goodwill towards men. The best ambition is the ambition to be good and brave and true. Let us not be at the beck and call of every passing fancy. Let us earnestly and courageously perform the task intrusted to us, however lowly it may be, and however inadequate its reward. To us it may seem the dreariest drudgery, but when we do it well and cheerfully for Christ's sake, even drudgery becomes divine.

Many years ago Charles Kingsley, as "Parson Lot," inaugurated a valiant crusade against the mammon worship of his day. Of course he met with the bitter and virulent hostility of all who loved money more than justice and brotherly love. But he earned an undying reputation as the friend and champion of humanity. We want another " Parson Lot" in these days to teach us that money is not a thing to be played with at the will of its possessor. Nothing will help so much to solve certain modern problems as the dissemination of Bible teaching regarding money. The idea of the Bible is distinctly that of stewardship. The money you put away in the bank is, in a limited and mechanical sense, your own property.

But looked at from the higher and more. Christian standpoint, it is not yours at all. It is given to you as a trusty not as a possession. If that great and unassailable principle could prevail in the minds and hearts of men, gambling would be annihilated once and for all. Because the old stock argument in favor of betting - it generally comes from flabby, unhealthy young men of dissipated life and restricted intellect - is this : " Oh, but you know, old fellow, a man can do as he likes with his own money." Certainly; I grant that entirely. But the fact is that the money is not yours. God has placed it in your hands for fifty or sixty years, and there will come a day of reckoning when He will want to know what good you have accomplished, what poverty you have relieved and what evil you have destroyed by the powerful and influential gift which He intrusted in your keeping. One hardly likes to think what the result will be when you have to confess that you tossed the gold to the devil - that you flung it away at poker or that you handed it to some rascally poolseller.

It is impossible to write of money and morals without protesting against the biggest curse of modern times. Nothing is more calculated to turn the smiling optimist into a despairing pessimist than the incalculable ruin which is being wrought every day by betting and gambling. This is undoubtedly the most serious and difficult problem with which Christian reformers have to grapple. So far we have scarcely touched it. There have been long and wordy discussions, a great deal of purposeless chatter has been poured forth in speeches and leading articles, and still we seem to make no progress - we are engaged in the useless occupation of beating the air. Convocation will not untie the knot; the newspaper is impotent simply because it is implicated ; and Christian men are too apt to trust to silvery rhetoric rather than to stringent reform.

The fact is, that nothing very helpful will be done until we clear our minds of cant. The practical common-sense of solemn dignitaries who fervently denounce betting and then sit down to play whist for dime points is somewhat difficult to detect. The wisdom of arresting one gambler and asking another to open a church bazaar is scarcely perceptible to the man in the street. Betting is fashionable ; the gambler is a respected, or at least a tolerated, individual, and even the great mass of Christian men and women have not yet had their eyes opened to the awful havoc caused by this passionate lust for gain. When they see how it robs men of character, health, and friends ; when they realize that horse-racing has more votaries than any religion ; then, I believe, they will rise up and denounce it fearlessly. The literature of the turf is enormous in extent and worldwide in influence. It provides a risky excitement for the rich and a hideous fever for the poor. It shows men how to get hold of their neighbors' property without giving any honest equivalent, which means, in plain English, that it makes men thieves.

It is simply alarming to contemplate the extent to which the deadly contagion is spreading through the country. Boys bet; young men neglect the beauties of literature for the " tips " of sporting papers ; and scarcely an office is without its sweep-stake on the Derby or the boatrace. This vice controls its victims with a fascination which is absolutely devilish, and the unutterable ruin which it inevitably works is almost heartbreaking. I therefore call upon every earnest, manly, Christian fellow to do all he can to stamp out this degrading and unchivalrous habit. For this two reasons are sufficient : - (1) It must be wrong to accept money for which you have given nothing in return ; and (2) it is the very essence of selfishness to use, as Kingsley says, " what you fancy your superior knowledge of a horse's merits to your neighbor's harm." " Work faithfully," says Mr. Ruskin, " and you will put yourself in possession of a glorious and enlarging happiness ; not such as can be won by the speed of a horse or marred by the obliquity of a ball."

All thoughtful and observant men must admit that materialism is the dominant peril of our age. As young men, therefore, we must be on our guard. Wealth is a useful servant when guarded by charity and wisdom, but it is a tyrannical master, and holds its subjects in galling and miserable servitude. Christ never thought much of money. The most hopeless and melancholy characters He ever drew were rich men. His Gospel teaches us that character is more than circumstances - a clean heart better than a big checkbook. Bacon has called riches " the baggage of virtue." "As baggage is to an army," he says, "so is riches to virtue; it cannot be spared or left behind, but it hindereth the march. Of great riches there is no real use, except it be in the distribution; the rest is but conceit." I have heard of a very wealthy merchant, who, attending church one night, was greatly impressed by the words of Christ, " A rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven." They lingered in his memory, and for years his rest was broken and his peace disturbed by this discomforting thought, '' Shall hardly enter?" Let us frankly confess then that if we have given our hearts over to mammon worship, we have, to say the least of it, made a tremendous mistake. The millionaire is not always the successful man. The richest merchant in the city may in reality be poorer than his meanest servant. For all the money on earth cannot compensate for a starved soul, a narrow mind, a limited outlook, and a life that confers no blessing on humanity. "Chinese" Gordon was comparatively poor, but he achieved vsrhat was better than all the fortunes of all the world's millionaires put together - a Christ-like character and a noble life-work. Who would not infinitely prefer to be Gordon with empty pockets than the richest gambler in the land?

Over the triple doorways of the cathedral of Milan there are three inscriptions spanning the splendid arches. Over one is carved a wreath of roses with the legend, "All that which pleases is but for a moment." Over the other is sculptured a cross accompanied by the words, "All that which troubles is but for a moment." But on the great central entrance to the main aisle is the inscription, "That only is important which is eternal." The lesson is obvious. It teaches us that morals are of more account than money, and that if we are wise we shall care less and less for the passing pageants of the hour, for the gratification of our frivolous fancies, and for the attainment of our worldly ambitions. We shall live for the heavenly, for the eternal, for the service of the strong and tender Christ, whose "well done " is more to be desired than all the plaudits of the universe.