means, and therefore leisure.
Jesus was right--What doth it profit? And think of the real riches that
in the meantime are missed.

It is like an addled-brain driver in making a trip across the continent.
He is possessed, obsessed with the insane desire of making a record. He
plunges on and on night and day, good weather and foul--and all the time
he is missing all the beauties, all the benefits to health and spirit
along the way. He has none of these when he arrives--he has missed them
all. He has only the fact that he has made a record drive--or nearly
made one. And those with him he has not only robbed of the beauties
along the way; but he has subjected them to all the discomforts along
the way. And what really underlies the making of a record? It is
primarily the spirit of vanity.

When the mental beauties of life, when the spiritual verities are
sacrificed by self-surrender to and domination by the material, one of
the heavy penalties that inexorable law imposes is the drying up, so to
speak, of the finer human perceptions--the very faculties of enjoyment.
It presents to the world many times, and all unconscious to himself, a
stunted, shrivelled human being--that eternal type that the Master had
in mind when he said: "Thou fool, this night shall thy soul be required
of thee." He whose sole employment or even whose primary employment
becomes the building of bigger and still bigger barns to take care of
his accumulated grain, becomes incapable of realising that life and the
things that pertain to it are of infinitely more value than barns, or
houses, or acres, or stocks, or bonds, or railroad ties. These all have
their place, all are of value; but they can never be made the life. A
recent poem by James Oppenheim presents a type that is known to nearly
every one:[B]

I heard the preacher preaching at the funeral:
He moved the relatives to tears telling them of
the father, husband, and friend that was dead:
Of the sweet memories left behind him:
Of a life that was good and kind.

I happened to know the man,
And I wondered whether the relatives would
have wept if the preacher had told the truth:
Let us say like this:

"The only good thing this man ever did in his life,
Was day before yesterday:
_He died_....
But he didn't even do that of his own volition....
He was the meanest man in business on Manhattan Island,
The most treacherous friend, the cr