in!’ Riches are no sin in themselves, but, like all forms of strength, a very great and dangerous temptation.  This man had yielded.  Prosperity was so unchanging with him that he had come to trust it, and did not feel the need of trusting anything else.  He was strong enough to stand alone:  so strong that he tried to stand without God.  If he was like many self-centred men of our own time he probably did not admit this.  But it is not profession which reveals where a man puts his trust.  It is the practice and discipline of life, betraying us by a hundred commonplace ways, in spite of all the orthodoxy we boast.  It is sorrow and duty and the call to self-denial.  When this man’s feelings got low, when he was visited by touches of melancholy—­those chills sent forward from the grave to every mortal travelling thither,—­when conscience made him weak and fearful, then he made not God his strength, but trusted in the abundance of his riches.  With that audacity which the touch of property breeds in Us, he said, ’I am sure of to-morrow,’ plunged into cruel plans, gloried in his mischief, and was himself again.

Trusting in riches—­we all do it, when we seek to drive away uncomfortable fears and the visitations of conscience by self-indulgence; when, instead of saying I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my help?—­and seeking the steep and arduous consolations of duty, we look into our nearest friends’ faces and whine for a sympathy that is often insincere, or lie down in some place of comfort that is stolen or unclean.

No man with such habits stops there.  This big man strengthened himself in his wickedness and in all manner of guile and cruelty.  It is a natural development.  The heart which finds life in material wealth is usually certain to go farther and seek for more in the satisfaction of base and sullen appetites.  We hear, it is true, a great deal about the softening influence of wealth, and moralists speak of luxury as if its bad effects were negative and it only enervated.  But if riches and the habit of trusting to them, if the material comforts of life and complacency in them, only made men sleek and tame—­if luxury did nothing but soften and emasculate—­the world would have been far more stupid and far less cruel than it is to-day.

They are not negative tempers, but very positive and aggressive ones, which the Bible associates with a love of wealth, and we have but to remember history to know that the Bible is right.  Luxury may have dulled the combative instincts in man, but it has often nursed the meanly cruel ones.  The Romans with the rapid growth of their wealth loved the battlefield less; but the sight of the arena, with its struggling gladiators, and beasts tearing women and children, became more of a necessity to their appetites.  Take two instances.  Titus was a rough, hardened soldier; but he wept at the horrors which his siege obliged him to inflict on Jerusalem.  Nero was