And meanwhile, who are we that we should complain of the Jews now, or the Jews of our Lord’s time, for being too fond of money?  Is anything more certain, than that we English are becoming given up, more and more, to the passion for making money at all risks, and by all means fair or foul?  Our covetousness is—­alas! that it should be so—­become a by-word among foreign nations; while our old English commercial honesty—­which was once our strength, and protected us from, and all but atoned for, our covetousness—­is going fast; and leaving us, feared indeed for our power; but suspected for our chicanery; and odious for our arrogance.

And it is most sad, but most certain, that we are like those Pharisees of old in this also, that we too have made up our mind that we can serve God and Mammon at once; that the very classes among us who are most utterly given up to money-making, are the very classes which, in all denominations, make the loudest religious profession; that our churches and chapels are crowded on Sundays by people whose souls are set, the whole week through, upon gain and nothing but gain; who pretend to reverence Scripture, while they despise the warning of Scripture, that the love of money is the root of all evil.

Have we not seen in our own days persons of the highest religious profession, whose names were the foremost on every charitable subscription list, so devoured by this mad love for money for its own sake, that though they had already more money than they could spend, or enjoy in any way soever, save by saying to themselves—­I have got it, I have got it—­they must needs, in the mere lust for becoming richer still, ruin themselves and others by frantic speculations?  Have we not seen—­but why should I defile myself, and you, and this holy place by telling you what I have seen; and what I hope, and hope alas! in vain, that I shall never see again, among those who must needs serve God and Mammon?  Has not the love of money become such a chronic disease among us, that we can actually calculate, now, when the disease will come to a head; and relieve itself for a while:  though alas! only for a while?

About every eleven years, I am informed, we are to expect a commercial crisis; panics, bankruptcies, and misery and ruin to hundreds; a sort of terrible but beneficent thunderstorm, which clears the foul atmosphere of our commercial system at the expense, alas! not merely of the guilty, but of the innocent; involving the widow and the orphan, the poor and the simple, in the same fate as the rich and powerful whom they have trusted to their own ruin.  And yet we boast of our civilization and of our Christianity; and hardly one, here and there, lays the lesson to heart, but each man, like a moth about a candle, unwarned by the fate of his fellows, fancies that he at least can flutter round the flames and not be burned; that whoever else cannot serve God and Mammon, he can do it; and holds, by virtue of his superior prudence, a special dispensation from the plain warnings of Holy Scripture.