the law will bear
him out; if he be honest on principle, he will consult the law of
his conscience, and if he be a Christian, he will consult the
written law of God. We never deceive ourselves more than when we
overreach others. You would not allow that you had robbed your
neighbor for the world, yet you are not ashamed to own you have
outwitted him. I have read this great truth in the works of a
heathen, Mr. Bragwell, that the chief misery of man arises from his
not knowing how to make right calculations."

_Bragwell._ Sir, the remark does not belong to me. I have not made
an error of a farthing. Look at the account, sir--right to the
smallest fraction.

_Worthy._ Sir, I am talking of final accounts; spiritual
calculations; arithmetic in the long run. Now, in this, your real
Christian is the only true calculator; he has found out that we
shall be richer in the end, by denying, than by indulging
ourselves. He knows that when the balance comes to be struck, when
profit and loss shall be summed up, and the final account adjusted,
that whatever ease, prosperity, and delight we had in this world,
yet if we have lost our souls in the end, we can not reckon that we
have made a good bargain. We can not pretend that a few items of
present pleasure make any great figure, set over against the sum
total of eternal misery. So you see it is only for want of a good
head at calculation that men prefer time to eternity, pleasure to
holiness, earth to heaven. You see if we get our neighbor's money at
the price of our own integrity; hurt his good name, but destroy our
own souls; raise our outward character, but wound our inward
conscience; when we come to the last reckoning, we shall find that
we were only knaves in the second instance, but fools in the first.
In short, we shall find that whatever other wisdom we possessed, we
were utterly ignorant of the skill of true calculation.

Notwithstanding this rebuff, Mr. Bragwell got home in high spirits,
for no arguments could hinder him from feeling that he had the fifty
guineas in his purse.

There is to a worldly man something so irresistible in the actual
possession of present, and visible, and palpable pleasure, that he
considers it as a proof of his wisdom to set them in decided
opposition to the invisible realities of eternity.

As soon as Bragwell came in, he gayly threw the money he had
received on the table, and desired his wife to lock it up. Instead
of receiving it with he