in the life of the hour, thou servest mammon; he holds
thee in his chain; thou art his ape, whom he leads
about the world for the mockery of his fellow-devils.
If with thy word, yea, even with thy judgment, thou
confessest that God is the only good, yet livest as
if He had sent thee into the world to make thyself
rich before thou die; if it will add one feeblest
pang to the pains of thy death, to think that thou
must leave thy fair house, thy ancestral trees, thy
horses, thy shop, thy books, behind thee, then art
thou a servant of mammon, and far truer to thy master
than he will prove to thee. Ah, slave! the moment
the breath is out of the body, lo, he has already
deserted thee! and of all in which thou didst rejoice,
all that gave thee such power over thy fellows, there
is not left so much as a spike of thistle-down for
the wind to waft from thy sight. For all thou
hast had, there is nothing to show. Where is
the friendship in which thou mightst have invested
thy money, in place of burying it in the maw of mammon?
Troops of the dead might now be coming to greet thee
with love and service, hadst thou made thee friends
with thy money; but, alas! to thee it was not money,
but mammon, for thou didst love it—not
for the righteousness and salvation thou by its means
mightst work in the earth, but for the honor it brought
thee among men, for the pleasures and immunities it
purchased. Some of you are saying in your hearts,
’Preach to thyself, and practice thine own preaching;’—and
you say well. And so I mean to do, lest having
preached to others I should be myself a cast-away—drowned
with some of you in the same pond of filth. God
has put money in my power through the gift of one
whom you know. I shall endeavor to be a faithful
steward of that which God through her has committed
to me in trust. Hear me, friends—to
none of you am I the less a friend that I tell you
truths you would hide from your own souls: money
is not mammon; it is God’s invention; it is
good and the gift of God. But for money and the
need of it, there would not be half the friendship
in the world. It is powerful for good when divinely
used. Give it plenty of air, and it is sweet as
the hawthorn; shut it up, and it cankers and breeds
worms. Like all the best gifts of God, like the
air and the water, it must have motion and change and
shakings asunder; like the earth itself, like the heart
and mind of man, it must be broken and turned, not
heaped together and neglected. It is an angel
of mercy, whose wings are full of balm and dews and
refreshings; but when you lay hold of him, pluck his
pinions, pen him in a yard, and fall down and worship
him—then, with the blessed vengeance of
his master, he deals plague and confusion and terror,
to stay the idolatry. If I misuse or waste or
hoard the divine thing, I pray my Master to see to
it—my God to punish me. Any fire rather
than be given over to the mean idol! And now
I will make an offer to my townsfolk in the face of
this congregation—that, whoever will, at
the end of three years, bring me his books, to him
also will I lay open mine, that he will see how I
have sought to make friends of the mammon of unrighteousness.
Of the mammon-server I expect to be judged according
to the light that is in him, and that light I know
to be darkness.