Choose, young men; choose now; and make up your minds which way you will rise in life; by merely getting money; or by getting wisdom and honour and virtue.  The Psalmists of old, yea our Lord Himself, tell you what will happen in each case.  If you want only to be rich, why then be rich; if you are clever enough.  The Lord may give you what you want, in this evil world.  He may give you your portion in this life, and fill you with His hid treasure.  He may let you heap up money which you do not know how to spend, and be a laughing-stock to others while you live; and after you die, your children will probably squander what you have hoarded; while you will carry away nothing when you die, neither will your pomp follow you:  and take care lest you wake, after all, like Dives in the torment, to hear the fearful but most reasonable words—­“Son, thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and therefore thou art tormented.”  Those words too, I fear, will come true, in this very generation, of many a wretched soul who while he lived counted himself a happy man; and had all men speaking well of him, because he did well unto himself.  On whose souls may God have mercy.

Choose, young men:  choose; now in the golden days of youth, and strength, and honour, ere you have laid a yoke on your own shoulders—­even the yoke of money-worship;—­not light and easy, like the yoke of Christ, but heavier and heavier as the years roll on, while you, with fading intellect, fading hopes, and it may be fading credit, and certainly fading power of any rational enjoyment, have still, like the doomed souls in Dante’s Inferno, to roll up hill the money-bags which are perpetually slipping back.  I have seen that, and more than once or twice; and it is, I think, the saddest sight on earth—­save one.  Choose, I say again, then, young men, before you have spread a net round your own feet, which, as in disturbed dreams, grows and tangles more and more each time you move—­even the net of greed and craft, which men set for their neighbours; and are but too apt, ere all is done, to be taken in themselves; the net of truly bad society, of the society of men who have set their hearts on making money, somehow or other; and with whom, if you cast in your lot, you may descend—­O God, I know full well what I am saying—­to depths from which your young spirits now would shrink; till your higher nature be subdued to the element in which it works; and the poet’s curse on all who bind themselves to natures lower than their own come true of you—­

   Thou shall lower to their level, day by day,
   All that once was fine within thee growing coarse to sympathize with
   clay.

Or you may choose—­God grant that you may choose—­the other path; the path of the law of Christ, and of the Spirit of Christ; the kingdom of God and His righteousness.  And then shall come true of you, as far as God shall see good for your immortal soul, those other promises—­