How universal is it among those who are in pursuit of wealth to make gold their hope; and, among those who are in possession of wealth, to make fine gold their confidence! Yet we are here told that this is virtually as complete a renunciation of God as to practise some of the worst charms of idolatry. We recoil from an idolater as from one who labours under a great moral derangement, in suffering his regards to be carried away from the true God to an idol. But is it not just the same derangement, on the part of man, that he should love any created good, and in the enjoyment of it lose sight of the Creator--that, thoroughly absorbed with the present and the sensible gratification, there should be no room left for the movements of duty, or regard to the Being who furnished him with the materials, and endowed him with the organs of every gratification? There is an important distinction between the love of money, and the love of what money purchases. Either of these affections may equally displace God from the heart. But there is a malignity and an inveteracy of atheism in the former which does not belong to the latter, and in virtue of which it may be seen that the love of money is, indeed, the root of all evil. A man differs from an animal in being something more than a sensitive being. He is also a reflective being. He has the power of thought, and inference, and anticipation. And yet it will be found, in the case of every natural man, that the exercise of those powers, so far from having carried him nearer, has only widened his departure from God, and given a more deliberate and wilful character to his atheism than if he had been without them altogether. In virtue of the powers of mind which belong to him, he can carry his thoughts beyond the present desires and the present gratification. He can calculate on the visitations of future desire, and on the means of its gratification. But the reason of man, and the retrospective power of man, still fail to carry him, by an ascending process, to the first cause. He stops at the instrumental cause, which, by his own wisdom and his own power, he has put into operation. In a word, the man’s understanding is overrun with atheism, as well as his desires. To look no further than to fortune as the dispenser of all the enjoyments which money can purchase, is to make that fortune stand in the place of God. It is to make sense shut out faith. We have the authority of that Word which has been pronounced a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart, that it cannot have two masters, or that there is not in it room for two great and ascendant affections. Covetousness offers a more daring and positive aggression on the right and territory of the Godhead, than even infidelity. The latter would only desolate the sanctuary of heaven; the former would set up an abomination in the midst of it. When the liking and the confidence of men are toward money, there is no direct intercourse, either by the one or the other of these affections towards God; and in proportion as he sends forth his desires, and rests his security on the former, in that very proportion does he renounce God as his hope, and God as his dependence. (T. Chalmers, D. D.)
The worship of wealth
What is the true idea of property--something to be left behind when we die, or something which may be interwoven with our immortal nature, and so will last us for eternity? Money, jewels, lands, houses, books, decorations of all sorts and kinds, must be taken leave of at the bed of death. But there are things that last. Habits are wrought into the intellect and will--the love of God and of man, sincerity, purity, disinterestedness, these things live, and are really property, for death cannot touch them. Most men regard civilisation as mere material progress; but true human improvement must be an improvement of the man himself. And man himself is not what he owns and can handle, nor even his bodily frame, but he is a spirit clothed in a bodily form. His real improvement consists in that which secures the freedom and the supremacy of the noblest part of his nature. A true civilisation is that which shall promote this upon a great scale in human society. What do we see every year as the London season draws near, but a bevy of mothers, like generals, set out on a campaign, prepared to undergo any amount of fatigue if only they can marry their daughters, not necessarily to high-souled, virtuous men, but in any ease to a fortune! What do we see but a group of young men, thinking, after perhaps a career of dissipation, that the time has arrived for settling respectably in life, and looking, each one of them, not for a girl who has the graces and character which will make her husband and children happy, but for somebody who has a sufficient dowry to enable him to keep up a large establishment! Who can wonder, when the most sacred of all human relations, the union of hearts for time and for eternity, is thus prostituted to the brutal level of an affair of cash, that such transactions are quickly followed by months or years of misery--misery which, after seething long in private, is at last paraded before the eyes of the wondering world amid the unspeakable shame and degradation of the Divorce Court! (Canon Liddon.)
