26 THE POWER OF GOLD. ambitious, because it can exalt; the stupid, because it compensates for dulness. And the savage and the civilised equally own its power; it competed with cannibalism for the control of the brutalised Feejee. Prosperity fans it, and adversity cannot quench it; men willingly bow down before it, as the tyrant summoned them of old to bow before another idol in the plain of Dura. Herbert was right when he apostrophised gold, and said : "Thou art the man, and man but dross to thee." For it, the domestic affections are chilled or outraged. For it, the training of the young is neglected by their parents, or delegated to others, that the father may live amid the scenes where men scramble for riches. If such fathers train their children at all, it is often in little else than the mean knowledge which teaches how to buy, and sell, and get gain. Farther: this passion reigns in the senate-house, among our honourable men; and money is often regarded there as a synonyme for both wisdom and power. I was the channel, the Secretary of a former prime-minister once said without a blush, of carrying a parliamentary measure "by a pecuniary distribution." "With my own hand, I secured one hundred and thirty votes. Eighty thousand pounds were set apart for the purpose. Forty members of the House of Commons received from me a thousand pounds each. To eighty others I paid five hundred pounds a piece."* And the same vicious power is ascendant upon Exchange, and in the market * Chronicles and Characters of the Stock Exchange, p. 97. THE FRAUDS OF MERCHANDISE. 27 place he who does not pay assiduous homage to the idol there, must leave these busy haunts, while the mere fraudulent semblance of wealth not seldom dupes those who are blinded by their passion, till they are caught in the pitfall which is dug for themselves by those who deem opulence the chief good. Examples of all this occur from time to time, but the following, which is an affair of yesterday, may suffice for all:- Certain merchants in London lately failed in business, and absconded. The liabilities of their firm amounted to £500,000. On being apprehended at Malta and brought back to this country, they were charged with three distinct offences, and committed for trial upon two charges of felony, each entailing punishments of not less than seven years' transportation, or four years of penal servitude.* Now surely such things clearly exhibit the worthlessness of mere mercantile honour, and the need of some higher principles to resist the pressure of Mammon, whose highest maxim is "Post nummos virtus." An orator and judge of our day has said, that as surely as the vulture in her blood-stained nest hatches a vulture, does the flattery of courtiers foster tyranny and tyrants; and not less surely does the unlicensed love of money lead to infamy or degradation. But we are still only touching the margin of the empire of money. Along with ambition and the love of pleasure, it is the grand instigator of men's actions. * "The polite term for public swindling is defalcation, a very genteel term to gild the character of those whose desert is imprisonment.”— Mercantile Morals, by W. H. Van Doren. It is the passport to command in our armies; it opens the way to a place in the councils of royalty. In the spirit of Simon Magus, it purchases even "the cure of souls," for instead of being branded with the stigma of infamy, covetousness has so far encroached upon all that is pure and holy, that the church, nay, the very altars of God, are polluted by its presence. The love of money thus clings to man like the garment by which fable tells us that Hercules was consumed. Like the famishing ostrich, which will swallow wood, stones, or even iron, this passion is omnivorous, and we cannot decide how far an old man must have advanced in the process of dying, before his confidence in his idol, his love of it, his grief at losing it, his determination still to grasp it, shall have passed away. Even to that dying sinner, the passion for money is like the rod of Moses, swallowing up all that comes into competition with it. "Who so intent upon the world commonly as those who are just going out of it? Who so diligent in heaping up wealth as those who have neither will nor power to spend it."* A mother's love for her children has been called the mighty hunger of the heart, but have we not something now before us which still better deserves that name? Yet even more than this. Some of these conquests are only vulgar triumphs, and money has accomplished greater things than these. It has laid prostrate the grandest intellects, and baffled the profoundest philosophers. Seneca, for example, reasoned against avarice like a sage, and yet became its victim, till his accumulations * Dr South. LORD BACON, A VICTIM. 29 attracted the imperial cupidity of Nero, and gave occasion to the philosopher's death. Nay, even the founder of a new philosophy has fallen before the power of riches. Lord Bacon could call them "the baggage of virtue," or a mere incumbrance to it. He could assure us that "there is no use of riches but in spending them;" and add, that "the possession of them gives their master no sensible pleasure." He could sagely counsel men thus: "Seek not to raise great riches, but such as thou mayest get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully, and leave contentedly." "The ways to grow rich," that philosopher adds, "are various, and most of them foul;" and yet that very man, so sound and sage in council, lived, like Seneca, to trample upon all his own admonitions: his conduct became a living comment on the words— "Ill fares the land, to hastening woes a prey, As Lord Chancellor of England, Bacon took bribes to the computed amount of £100,000. He soiled the ermine beyond what most men have done, and became at last as piteous and degraded as he had before been subservient to a tyrant. Such is the power of money.* But we need not prolong a description of the parent sin of covetousness. It is "the wolf in man's breast"an unquenchable desire for more and more of God's gifts, that we may put them in the place of himself. In *"Take heed and beware of covetousness'-'Take heed and beware of covetousness'-' Take heed and beware of covetousness.' And what if I should say nothing more these three hours but these words, 'Take heed and beware of covetousness?"-Latimer, Sermon before Edward VI. 30 THE SPIRIT OF OUR AGE. one form or another, it appears in all the sons of men, from the little child, grasping with precocious greed at all that is within his reach, weeping for more, and resenting every encroachment upon his stores, to the tottering but unrelaxing owner of a hundred thousand, who is only a few paces, or a few breaths, from the tomb. All, all mistake wealth for happiness, or gifts for God. It thus becomes at once the stigma and the bane of the Church. The fumes of worldliness, and the mists which it sheds over all holy things-the Saviour, the cross, and glory-hide the beauty, and fetter the power of truth, as it should appear in the lives of Christian men. For this cause, in conjunction with others, many are weak and sickly among us, and some sleep; not a few are so deeply deluded as to suppose that "gain is godliness ;"they forget what Sir Matthew Hale has said, that when he saw the spider framing her web, with exquisite skill, and remembered how a servant-maid might soon sweep it all away; or ants forming their heap with utmost industry, while yet a little boy in sport, or a bird in quest of food, might destroy the whole, he was taught how easily riches amassed with care might be dissipated in spite of us, and he therefore tried, as all should do, to modify his love of money. It is obvious, moreover, that the spirit of our age is turned, like a sweeping rapid, in the direction of amassing riches with haste. This appears not merely from the crowds who have hurried away to the gold-fields of foreign lands-that may be deemed only a feverish and transient outbreak of cupidity-but yet more from the |