live for pleasure is not to be foreordained to
misery. Whoso loves God or freedom or growth of mind or strength of
heart, feels that pleasure is his foe.

"A king of feasts and flowers, and wine and revel,
And love and mirth, was never King of glory."

Of money, as the end or ideal of life, it should not be necessary to
speak. As a fine contempt for life, a willingness to throw it away in
defence of any just cause or noble opinion, is one of the privileges of
youth, so the generous heart of the young holds cheap the material
comforts which money procures. To be young is to be free, to be able to
live anywhere on land or sea, in the midst of deserts or among strange
people; is to be able to fit the mind and body to all circumstance, and
to rise almost above Nature's iron law. He who is impelled by this high
and heavenly spirit will dream of flying and not of hobbling through
life on golden crutches. Let the feeble and the old put their trust in
money; but where there is strength and youth, the soul should be our
guide.

And yet the very law and movement of our whole social life seem to point
to riches as the chief good.

"What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?
Every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys."

Money is the god in whom we put our trust, to whom instinctively we pay
homage. We believe that the rich are fortunate, are happy, that the best
of life has been given to them. We have faith in the power of money, in
its sovereign efficacy to save us not only from beggary, from sneers and
insults, but we believe that it can transform us, and take away the
poverty of mind, the narrowness of heart, the dullness of imagination,
which make us weak, hard, and common. Even our hatred of the rich is but
another form of the worship of money. The poor think they are wretched,
because they think money the chief good; and if they are right, then is
it a holy work to strive to overthrow society as it is now constituted.
Buckle and Strauss find fault with the Christian religion because it
does not inculcate the love of money. But in this, faith and reason are
in harmony. Wealth is not the best, and to make it the end of life is
idolatry, and as Saint Paul declares, the root of evil. Man is more than
money, as the workman is more than his tools. The soul craves quite
other nourishment than that which the whole material universe can
supply. Man's chief good l