Now, if that is the meaning of ‘treasure,’ then this great saying of nay text is, as a matter of course, true.  For what in each case makes the treasure is precisely the going out of the heart to grapple it, and it is just because the heart is there that a thing is the treasure.

Now, I need not do more than remind you, I suppose, that in Scripture ‘heart’ means a great deal more than it does in our modern usage, for we employ it as an expression for the affections, whereas the Bible takes it as including the whole inner man.  For instance, we read, ’As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he’; and of ’the thoughts and intents of the heart.’  So then the affections, as with us, but also thoughts, purposes, volitions, are all included in the word; and as one passage of Scripture says, ‘Out of it are the issues of life.’  It is the central reservoir, the central personality, the indivisible unit of the thinking, willing, feeling, loving person which I call ‘myself.’  So what Christ says is that where a man’s treasure lies, not merely his affections will twine round it, but his whole self will be, as it were, implicated and intertwisted with it, so as that what befalls it will befall him.

Now, further, notice that this saying, so obviously true, is introduced by a ‘for,’ and that it is the broad basis on which rest the obligation and the wisdom of the double counsel which has preceded, on the one hand, the warning against choosing perishable and uncertain good for our treasure, and mixing ourselves up with that, and on the other the loving counsel to choose for ourselves the wealth which is perpetual, unprecarious, and certain.

So I think we may look at these words from a threefold point of view, and see in them a mirror that will show us ourselves, a dissuasive and a persuasive.  Let us take these three aspects.

I. Here, then, is a mirror that a man may hold up before himself, and find out something about himself by it.

For, like other general statements of the same sort, you can turn this saying round about, and take it the other way, and not only say, as the text says, ‘where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,’ but, ‘where your heart is, there is your treasure.’  A man’s real god is the thing that he counts best, and for which he works most earnestly, and which, as I said, he most longs to have, and trembles to think he will lose.  That is his god, and his treasure, whatever his professions may be.  Where your heart is, there is your treasure.

Now, of course, for the larger part of the lives of all of us, there are certain lines laid down by our circumstances, our trades, our various duties, on which the train of our thoughts and efforts must run.  But the question is, When I am set free from the constraint of my daily avocations and pressing duties, and am at liberty to go as I like, where do I go?  When the weight is taken off the sapling in the nursery