It will be readily conceded that the miser is a worldly man.  He loves gold for its own sake; he hoards up riches, not with the view of enjoying them, but in order to satisfy an inordinate greed of possession; his chief object in life is to die worth his hundreds, his thousands, or his millions.  Though rich, he is frequently tormented with the fear of ending his days in want, and is more anxious for the morrow than the poorest of the poor.  The only redeeming point in his character is his self-denial—­a truly noble characteristic when associated with a generous disposition—­which, however, in his case, loses its value through the sordidness of its aim.  Yes, he is a worldly man, beyond the shadow of a doubt.  But this is equally true of the man whose manner of life is the very opposite of this—­the spendthrift.  He values money only in so far as it enables him to make a grand display, to spend his days in riotous living, to gain the goodwill of the empty, useless, pleasure-living society in which he moves.  How totally different the latter from the former!  How frequently do they despise and condemn each other—­the miser the spendthrift, and the spendthrift the miser!  And yet they worship, so to speak, at the same shrine; they are victims of the same delusion; they both make this world their all.

This love of the world leads in every case to separation from God.  The story of the Fall furnishes an apt illustration of this fatal result.  Stript of its poetic setting, what have we there depicted?  Covetousness—­the desire of material good—­the determination to obtain it at all hazards.  It was under this guise that sin made its first entrance into human life—­sin, which in its turn

  “Brought death into our world and all our woe.”

Now mark the effect of the first act of transgression.  We are told that when Adam and his wife heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, they “hid themselves” from His presence “amongst the trees.”  In other words, the cords of love which up to that point bound man to God were rudely severed.  Before this the thought of God filled their souls with joy; they loved to hear His voice in the whisperings of the wind, to see His smile in the merry sunshine, to trace His power in the structure of the heavens; but now all was mysteriously changed, things which previously ministered to their enjoyment became a source of terror.

Why should the love of the world lead to this result?  It is because God must be all or nothing to the human soul.  The first commandment in the law is—­“Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”  This is not an arbitrary enactment, but it has its ground in the eternal fitness of things.  God is the infinitely powerful, the infinitely wise, and the infinitely good, and as such demands the undivided love of man.  Anything less than this, not only