s all
wrong to be poor, anyhow. Let us give in to that argument and pass that
to one side.

A gentleman gets up back there, and says, "Don't you think there are
some things in this world that are better than money?" Of course I do,
but I am talking about money now. Of course there are some things higher
than money. Oh yes, I know by the grave that has left me standing alone
that there are some things in this world that are higher and sweeter
and purer than money. Well do I know there are some things higher
and grander than gold. Love is the grandest thing on God's earth, but
fortunate the lover who has plenty of money. Money is power, money is
force, money will do good as well as harm. In the hands of good men and
women it could accomplish, and it has accomplished, good.

I hate to leave that behind me. I heard a man get up in a prayer-meeting
in our city and thank the Lord he was "one of God's poor." Well, I
wonder what his wife thinks about that? She earns all the money that
comes into that house, and he smokes a part of that on the veranda. I
don't want to see any more of the Lord's poor of that kind, and I don't
believe the Lord does. And yet there are some people who think in order
to be pious you must be awfully poor and awfully dirty. That does not
follow at all. While we sympathize with the poor, let us not teach a
doctrine like that.

Yet the age is prejudiced against advising a Christian man (or, as a Jew
would say, a godly man) from attaining unto wealth. The prejudice is so
universal and the years are far enough back, I think, for me to safely
mention that years ago up at Temple University there was a young man in
our theological school who thought he was the only pious student in that
department. He came into my office one evening and sat down by my desk,
and said to me: "Mr. President, I think it is my duty sir, to come in
and labor with you." "What has happened now?" Said he, "I heard you say
at the Academy, at the Peirce School commencement, that you thought it
was an honorable ambition for a young man to desire to have wealth, and
that you thought it made him temperate, made him anxious to have a good
name, and made him industrious. You spoke about man's ambition to have
money helping to make him a good man. Sir, I have come to tell you the
Holy Bible says that 'money is the root of all evil.'"

I told him I had never seen it in the Bible, and advised him to go out
into the chapel and get the Bible,