He applies it to both branches of His previous advice.  He had just said, ’Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.’  These are very primitive methods of depriving men of their treasures, arguing a comparatively simple state of society.  The moth is that which destroys wealth in garments, which was a great part of ancient Eastern wealth.  Rust rather means corrosion, or corruption, and applies to the other great kind of primitive wealth, in food and the stores of the harvest.  And the thieves who dig through the mud wall of the house, and carry away the owners’ little hoard of gold and silver, point also to a primitive condition of society.  But whatever may be the special force of these different words, they suggest to us this, that all that is here has its own particular and special enemy which wars against its permanence.  There are bacteria of all sorts, every vegetable has its own kind.  Every growth has to fear the gnawing of some foe.  And so every treasure that I can gather into my heart, excepting one, is threatened by some kind of danger.

No man can have lived as long in a great commercial community, as some of us have done, without knowing that there are a great many besides professional and so-called thieves in it, that take away the gold and silver.  How many instances I can look back upon, of lords of the exchange and magnates of trade, who carved their names, as they thought, in imperishable marble on the doors of their warehouses, and then became bankrupt and fugitive, and were lost sight of.  We all know the uncertainty of riches.

And are the other kinds of treasure that we cleave to more reliable?  Have they not their moths and their rusts?  Is it pleasure?  Well, I say nothing about the diseases that fill the bones of many a young man who flings himself into dissipation; but I remind you of just this one thing, that all that pleasure tends to become flat, stale, and unprofitable.  That which the poet said of his own class, that it ’begins in gladness, and thereof cometh in the end despondency and madness,’ is true of every delight of sense, ay! and of more than sense, of taste and of intellect.  As the Book of Proverbs has it, ’the end of that mirth is heaviness.’

Brethren, the moth and the rust claim as their prey all treasures except one.  Is it love-pure, blessed, soul-filling, soul-resting as it is?  Yes, and on a hundred walls in any city there hangs, and in a thousand hearts there hangs, that great picture where the feeble form of Love is trying to repel from entrance into the rose-covered portal of the home the inevitable and mighty shrouded form of Death.  Is it culture?  ’Whether there be tongues they shall cease; whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away.’  The last illuminator and teacher, which is Death, antiquates and brushes aside, as of no use in the new conditions, most of the knowledge which men, wisely in a measure, but foolishly if exclusively, have sought to acquire for themselves here below.