human heart, may decide the question, whether wife and children shall grow up affluent, refined, happy, yes, and good, or be reduced to hard straits, with all the manifold evils which grow of poverty in the case of those who have been reduced to it after knowing other things.  You often think, I doubt not, in quiet hours, what would become of your children, if you were gone.  You have done, I trust, what you can to care for them, even from your grave:  you think sometimes of a poetical figure of speech amid the dry technical phrases of English law:  you know what is meant by the law of Mortmain; and you like to think that even your dead hand may be felt to be kindly intermeddling yet in the affairs of those who were your dearest:  that some little sum, slender, perhaps, but as liberal as you could make it, may come in periodically when it is wanted, and seem like the gift of a thoughtful, heart and a kindly hand which are far away.  Yes, cut down your present income to any extent, that you may make some provision for your children after you are dead.  You do not wish that they should have the saddest of all reasons for taking care of you, and trying to lengthen out your life.  But even after you have done everything which your small means permit, you will still think, with an anxious heart, of the possibilities of Future Years.  A man or woman who has children has very strong reason for wishing to live as long as may be, and has no right to trifle with, health or life.  And sometimes, looking out into days to come, you think of the little things, hitherto so free from man’s heritage of care, as they may some day be.  You see them shabby, and early anxious:  can that be the little boy’s rosy face, now so pale and thin?  You see them in a poor room, in which you recognize your study chairs, with the hair coming out of the cushions, and a carpet which you remember now threadbare and in holes.

It is no wonder at all that people are so anxious about money.  Money means every desirable material thing on earth, and the manifold immaterial things which come of material possessions.  Poverty is the most comprehensive earthly evil; all conceivable evils, temporal, spiritual, and eternal, may come of that.  Of course, great temptations attend its opposite; and the wise man’s prayer will be what it was long ago—­’Give me neither poverty nor riches.’  But let us have no nonsense talked about money being of no consequence.  The want of it has made many a father and mother tremble at the prospect of being taken from their children; the want of it has embittered many a parent’s dying hours.  You hear selfish persons talking vaguely about faith.  You find such heartless persons jauntily spending all they get on themselves, and then leaving their poor children to beggary, with the miserable pretext that they are doing all this through their abundant trust in God.  Now this is not faith; it is insolent presumption.  It is exactly as if a man should jump from the top of