t mammon,
for thou didst love it--not for the righteousness and salvation thou by
its means mightst work in the earth, but for the honor it brought thee
among men, for the pleasures and immunities it purchased. Some of you
are saying in your hearts, 'Preach to thyself, and practice thine own
preaching;'--and you say well. And so I mean to do, lest having preached
to others I should be myself a cast-away--drowned with some of you in
the same pond of filth. God has put money in my power through the gift
of one whom you know. I shall endeavor to be a faithful steward of that
which God through her has committed to me in trust. Hear me, friends--to
none of you am I the less a friend that I tell you truths you would hide
from your own souls: money is not mammon; it is God's invention; it is
good and the gift of God. But for money and the need of it, there would
not be half the friendship in the world. It is powerful for good when
divinely used. Give it plenty of air, and it is sweet as the hawthorn;
shut it up, and it cankers and breeds worms. Like all the best gifts of
God, like the air and the water, it must have motion and change and
shakings asunder; like the earth itself, like the heart and mind of man,
it must be broken and turned, not heaped together and neglected. It is
an angel of mercy, whose wings are full of balm and dews and
refreshings; but when you lay hold of him, pluck his pinions, pen him in
a yard, and fall down and worship him--then, with the blessed vengeance
of his master, he deals plague and confusion and terror, to stay the
idolatry. If I misuse or waste or hoard the divine thing, I pray my
Master to see to it--my God to punish me. Any fire rather than be given
over to the mean idol! And now I will make an offer to my townsfolk in
the face of this congregation--that, whoever will, at the end of three
years, bring me his books, to him also will I lay open mine, that he
will see how I have sought to make friends of the mammon of
unrighteousness. Of the mammon-server I expect to be judged according
to the light that is in him, and that light I know to be darkness.

"Friend, be not a slave. Be wary. Look not on the gold when it is yellow
in thy purse. Hoard not. In God's name, spend--spend on. Take heed how
thou spendest, but take heed that thou spend. Be thou as the sun in
heaven; let thy gold be thy rays, thy angels of love and life and
deliverance. Be thou a candle of the Lord to spread His light through