an artist, and fiddled while Rome was burning.  Coddle your boys; you may keep them from wishing to fight their equals, but you will not cure them of torturing animals.  Idleness means not only sluggishness, but a morbid and criminal desire for sensation, which honest industry would have sweated out of the flesh.  Money often renders those who have it unconsciously impatient with the slowness of poorer men, and unconsciously insolent about their defects.  Everywhere, on the high places of history, and within our own humble experience, we perceive the same truth, that materialism, and the temper which trusts in wealth or in success, does not turn men into fat oxen, but into tigers.  Hence the frequency with which the Old Testament, and especially the Psalms, connect an abundance of wealth with a strength of wickedness, and bracket for the same degree of doom the rich man and the violent one.  Our Psalm is natural in adding to the clause, trusting in the abundance of riches, that other about strengthening himself in wickedness.  This is the very temper of a prosperous and pampered life:  which seeks lust or cruelty not to forget itself, as a stunted and tortured nature may be forgiven for doing, but in order to work off its superfluous blood.

Observe, too, how much sins of the tongue are mentioned,-, lying, backbiting and the love of swallowing men’s reputations whole. Thou lovest all words of voracity, thou tongue of deceit.  We are, too, apt to think that sins of speech most fiercely beset weak and puny characters:  men that have no weapon but a sharp and nasty tongue.  Yet none use their words more recklessly than the strong, who have not been sobered by the rebuffs and uncertainties of life.  Power and position often make a man trifle with the truth.  A big man’s word carries far, and he knows it; till the temptation to be dogmatic or satirical, to snub and crush with a word, is as near to him as to a slave-driver is the fourteen-feet thong in his hand, with a line of bare black backs before him.

These things are written of ourselves.  In his great book on ’Democracy in America,’ De Tocqueville pointed out, more than fifty years ago, the dangers into which the religious middle classes fall by the spread of wealth and comfort.  That danger has increased, till for the rich on whom Christ called woe, we might well substitute the comfortable. At a time when a very moderate income brings within our reach nearly all the resources of civilisation, which of us does not find day by day a dozen distractions that drown for him the voice of conscience:  a crowd of men to lose himself in from God and his best friends:  half a dozen base comforts, in the lap of which he forgets duty and dreams only of self?  Comfort makes us all thoughtless, and thoughtlessness is the parent of every cruelty.