PERILS. — WEALTH. 171 



demands the preservation of a balance between our ma- 

 terial power and our moral and intellectual power. The 

 means of self-gratification should not outgrow the power 

 of self-control. Steam-power would have been useless 

 had we not found in iron, or something else, a greater 

 power of resistance. And, should we discover a motor 

 a hundred times more powerful than steam, it would 

 prove not only useless but fearfully destructive, unless 

 we could find a still greater resisting power. Increasing 

 wealth will only prove the means of destruction, unless 

 it is accompanied by an increasing power of control, a 

 stronger sense of justice, and a more intelligent compre- 

 hension of its obligations. 



There is a certain unfriendliness between the material 

 and the spiritual. The vivid apprehension of the one 

 makes the other seem unreal. When the life of the 

 senses is intense, spiritual existence and truths are dim ; 

 and when St. Paul was exalted to a spiritual ecstasy, the 

 senses were so closed that he could not tell whether he was 

 " in the body or out of the body." A time of commer- 

 cial stagnation is apt to be a time of spiritual quicken- 

 ing, while great material prosperity is likely to be ac- 

 companied by spiritual dearth. A poor nation is much 

 more sensitive to the power of the gospel than a rich 

 one. So Christ taught : "How hardly shall they that 

 have riches enter into the kingdom of God ! " " It is 

 easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than 

 for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of Grod!"^ 

 Words as true now as when they were first uttered, and 

 having a fuller meaning in the nineteenth century than 

 in the first. 



3. Again, great and increasing wealth subjects us to 

 all the perils of luxuriousness. Nations, in their begin- 

 nings, are poor ; poverty is favorable to hardihood and 

 industry; industry leads to thrift and wealth; wealth 

 produces luxury, and luxury results in enervation, cor- 

 ruption, and destruction. This is the historic round 



' Mark x. 23, 25. 



