king money! Is not that a
somewhat singular Hell?'

Yes, O Sauerteig, it is very singular. If we do not 'succeed,' where
is the use of us? We had better never have been born. "Tremble
intensely," as our friend the Emperor of China says: _there_ is the
black Bottomless of Terror; what Sauerteig calls the 'Hell of the
English'!--But indeed this Hell belongs naturally to the Gospel of
Mammonism, which also has its corresponding Heaven. For there _is_ one
Reality among so many Phantasms; about one thing we are entirely in
earnest: The making of money. Working Mammonism does divide the world
with idle game-preserving Dilettantism:--thank Heaven that there is
even a Mammonism, _any_thing we are in earnest about! Idleness is
worst, Idleness alone is without hope: work earnestly at anything, you
will by degrees learn to work at almost all things. There is endless
hope in work, were it even work at making money.

True, it must be owned, we for the present, with our Mammon-Gospel,
have come to strange conclusions. We call it a Society; and go about
professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not
a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named
'fair competition' and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have
profoundly forgotten everywhere that _Cash-payment_ is not the sole
relation of human beings; we think, nothing doubting, that _it_
absolves and liquidates all engagements of man. "My starving workers?"
answers the rich mill-owner: "Did not I hire them fairly in the
market? Did I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the sum covenanted
for? What have I to do with them more?"--Verily Mammon-worship is a
melancholy creed. When Cain, for his own behoof, had killed Abel, and
was questioned, "Where is thy brother?" he too made answer, "Am I my
brother's keeper?" Did I not pay my brother _his_ wages, the thing he
had merited from me?

O sumptuous Merchant-Prince, illustrious game-preserving Duke, is
there no way of 'killing' thy brother but Cain's rude way! 'A good man
by the very look of him, by his very presence with us as a fellow
wayfarer in this Life-pilgrimage, _promises_ so much:' woe to him if
he forget all such promises, if he never know that they were given!
To a deadened soul, seared with the brute Idolatry of Sense, to whom
going to Hell is equivalent to not making money, all 'promises,' and
moral duties, that cannot be pleaded for in Courts of Requests,
address themselves