f the years making
up his own present life is--a fool. The man who takes into his reckoning
not only the present generation, but all coming generations, in disposing
of his money is the shrewd financier.

Then occurs the sentence[17] that contains a wonderfully simple statement
for the keen, wise use of gold. The old version runs like this: "Make to
yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness that when ye fail they
may receive you into everlasting habitations." The revised version, both
English and American, reads this way: "Make to yourselves friends by means
of the mammon of unrighteousness that when _it_ shall fail they may
receive you into the eternal tabernacles."

I have ventured to make a rather free translation that I feel sure is true
to the words here in their connection and that gives in simple English
just what Jesus means. "Make to yourselves friends by means of money,
which the unrighteous world reckons riches, that when it fails they may
receive you," and so on. Money is not riches. The world commonly has been
befooled into thinking that it is. Perhaps we have not all quite escaped
that delusion. And money is not unrighteous. It is neither righteous, nor
unrighteous. It gets its moral quality from the man owning it for the time
being. It is as he is. It takes on the color of its ownership.

Make to yourselves friends by means of the money that comes into your
control that when it fails they may receive you. That is to say, exchange
your money into the kind of coin that is current in the kingdom of God.
Exchange your gold into _lives_. That is the sort of coin current in the
homeland. This yellow stuff we call riches they use for paving stones up
in the homeland. Would that we might get it under our feet down here,
instead of being ruled by it.

The current coin of heaven is lives of men. And that too will be reckoned
the precious metal when the Kingdom of God comes to the earth. Exchange
your money into _men_; purified, uplifted, redeemed men. Buy letters of
credit that will be good in the homeland, and in the coming Kingdom days
on the earth, if you would be wealthy.

"That when it fails," Jesus says with fine discernment. Money will fail.
There is an end to the power of gold in itself. Money will be bankrupt
some day. It has enormous buying power now. Some day its buying power will
be all gone. Then it will take the place of cobble-stones. Yet it would
seem to be a failure there unless some