“The sins which practice burns into the blood,
   And not the one dark hour which brings remorse
   Will brand us after of whose fold we be.”

I am surely right in noticing that the rich man is said to have fared sumptuously every day, as though faring sumptuously might have no significance, but the constantly faring sumptuously was what had degraded and debased the man below the level of the beggar at his gate.  I feel that to be luxurious occasionally is no bad thing, if we can keep our self-control, and return constantly to simple habits.  There is something very natural in the prayer which a little child was overheard to make—­“God, make me a good little girl, but”—­after a pause—­“naughty sometimes.”  It is the habit of being naughty which is pernicious.  Can anyone doubt that the man who, on the whole, leads a hardy and not over-indulgent life will be more capable of performing any duty which may devolve upon him than a man who “had but fed on the roses and lain in the lilies of life.”

Sydney Smith, in his sketches of Moral Philosophy, notices that habits of indulgence grow on us so much that we go through the act of indulgence without noticing it or feeling the pleasure of it; yet, if some accident occurs to rob us of our accustomed pleasure, we feel the want of it most keenly.  Speaking of Hobbes, the philosopher, he says that he had twelve pipes of tobacco laid by him every night before he began to write.  Without this luxury “he could have done nothing; all his speculations would have been at an end, and without his twelve pipes he might have been a friend to devotion or to freedom, which in the customary tenour of his thoughts he certainly was not.”

In Fielding’s Life of Jonathan Wild Mr. Wild plays at cards with the Count.  “Such was the power of habit over the minds of these illustrious persons that Mr. Wild could not keep his hands out of the Count’s pockets though he knew they were empty, nor could the Count abstain from palming a card though he was well aware Mr. Wild had no money to pay him.”

If we are curious to know who is the most degraded and most wretched of human beings, look for the man who has practised a vice so long that he curses it and clings to it.  Say everything for vice which you can say, magnify any pleasure as much as you please; but don’t believe you can keep it, don’t believe you have any secret for sending on quicker the sluggish blood and for refreshing the faded nerve.

There is no doubt that habits of luxury produce discontent, the more we have the more we want.  The sin of covetousness is not (curiously enough) the sin of the poor, but of the rich.  It is the rich man who covets Naboth’s vineyard.  I knew an old lady who had a beautiful house facing Hyde Park, and lived by herself with a companion, and certainly had room enough and to spare.  Her house was one of a row, and the next house being an end house projected, so that all the front rooms were about a foot longer than those of the old lady.  “Ah,” she used to sigh, “he’s a dear good man, the old colonel, but I should like to have his house—­please God to take him!” This showed a submission to the will of Providence, and a desire for the everlasting welfare of her neighbour which was truly edifying; but covetousness was at the root of it, and a longing to indulge herself.