“Mammon, you know, means riches.  Now, riches are meant to be the slave—­not even the servant of man, and not to be the master.  If a man serve his own servant, or, in a word, any one who has no just claim to be his master, he is a slave.  But here he serves his own slave.  On the other hand, to serve God, the source of our being, our own glorious Father, is freedom; in fact, is the only way to get rid of all bondage.  So you see plainly enough that a man cannot serve God and Mammon.  For how can a slave of his own slave be the servant of the God of freedom, of Him who can have no one to serve Him but a free man?  His service is freedom.  Do not, I pray you, make any confusion between service and slavery.  To serve is the highest, noblest calling in creation.  For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, yea, with Himself.

“But how can a man serve riches?  Why, when he says to riches, ’Ye are my good.’  When he feels he cannot be happy without them.  When he puts forth the energies of his nature to get them.  When he schemes and dreams and lies awake about them.  When he will not give to his neighbour for fear of becoming poor himself.  When he wants to have more, and to know he has more, than he can need.  When he wants to leave money behind him, not for the sake of his children or relatives, but for the name of the wealth.  When he leaves his money, not to those who need it, even of his relations, but to those who are rich like himself, making them yet more of slaves to the overgrown monster they worship for his size.  When he honours those who have money because they have money, irrespective of their character; or when he honours in a rich man what he would not honour in a poor man.  Then is he the slave of Mammon.  Still more is he Mammon’s slave when his devotion to his god makes him oppressive to those over whom his wealth gives him power; or when he becomes unjust in order to add to his stores.—­How will it be with such a man when on a sudden he finds that the world has vanished, and he is alone with God?  There lies the body in which he used to live, whose poor necessities first made money of value to him, but with which itself and its fictitious value are both left behind.  He cannot now even try to bribe God with a cheque.  The angels will not bow down to him because his property, as set forth in his will, takes five or six figures to express its amount It makes no difference to them that he has lost it, though; for they never respected him.  And the poor souls of Hades, who envied him the wealth they had lost before, rise up as one man to welcome him, not for love of him—­no worshipper of Mammon loves another—­but rejoicing in the mischief that has befallen him, and saying, ‘Art thou also become one of us?’ And Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom, however sorry he may be for him, however grateful he may feel to him for the broken victuals and the penny, cannot with one drop of the water of Paradise cool that man’s parched tongue.