Christ was Himself a poor man.  His mother was what to-day we should call a working-man’s wife, and probably also the mother of a large family.  When, as an infant, Jesus was presented in the Temple, the offering which His parents brought was that which the law prescribed in the case of the poor:  “a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons.”  When He came to manhood, and entered on His public ministry, He had no home He could call His own.  In His Father’s house, He said, were many mansions; but on earth He had not where to lay His head.  Women ministered unto Him of their substance.  We never read that He had any money at all.  When once He wanted to use a coin as an illustration, He borrowed it; when, at another time, He needed one with which to pay a tax, He wrought a miracle in order to procure it.  As He was dying, the soldiers, we are told, parted His garments among them—­that was all there was to divide.  When He was dead, men buried Him in another’s tomb.  More literally true than perhaps we always realize was the apostle’s saying, “He became poor.”

Who, then, will deny that a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth?  Yet how strangely materialized our thoughts have become!  Our very language has been dragged down and made a partner with us in our fall.  When, for example, our Authorized Version was written in 1611, the translators could write, without fear of being misunderstood, “Let no man seek his own, but every man another’s wealth” (i Cor. x. 24).[51] But though the nobler meaning of the word still survives in “well” and “weal,” “wealth” to-day is rarely used save to indicate abundance of material good.  When Thackeray makes “Becky Sharp” say that she could be good if she had L4000 a year, and when.  Mr. Keir Hardie asks if it is possible for a man to be a Christian on a pound a week, the thoughts of many hearts are revealed.  There is nothing to be done without money, we think; money is the golden key which unlocks all doors; money is the lever which removes all difficulties.  This is what many of us are saying, and what most of us in our hearts are thinking.  But clean across these spoken and unspoken thoughts of ours, there comes the life of Jesus, the man of Nazareth, to rebuke, and shame, and silence us.  Who in His presence dare speak any more of the sovereign might of money?

This is the lesson of the life of the Best.  Is it not also the lesson of the lives of the good in all ages?  The greatest name in the great world of Greece is Socrates; and Socrates was a poor man.  The greatest name in the first century of the Christian era is Paul; and Paul was a working-man and sometimes in want.  It was Calvinism, Mark Pattison said, that in the sixteenth century saved Europe, and Calvin’s strength, a Pope once declared, lay in this, that money had no charm for him.  John Wesley re-created modern England and left behind him “two silver teaspoons and the Methodist Church.”  The “Poets’ Corner” in Westminster Abbey, it has been said, commemorates a glorious company of paupers.  And even in America, the land of the millionaire and multi-millionaire, the names that are graven on the nation’s heart, and which men delight to honour, are not its Vanderbilts, or its Jay Goulds, but Lincoln, and Grant, and Garfield, and Webster, and Clay.