Much, however, as Christ has to say concerning the noble uses to which wealth may be put, it is not here, as every reader of the Gospels must feel, that the full emphasis of His words comes. It is when He goes on to speak of the perils of the rich, and of our wrong estimates of the worth of wealth, that His solemn warnings pierce to the quick. Christ did not live, nor does He call us to live, in an unreal world, though perhaps there are few subjects concerning which more unreal words have been spoken than this. The power of wealth is great, the power of consecrated wealth is incalculably great; and this the New Testament freely recognizes; but wealth is not the great, necessary, all-sufficing thing that ninety-nine out of a hundred of us believe it to be. And when we put it first, and make it the standard by which all things else are to be judged, Christ tells us plainly that we are falling into a temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts; we are piercing ourselves through with many sorrows. For once at least, then, let us try to look at money with His eyes and to weigh it in His balances.

Christ was Himself a poor man. His mother was what to-day we should call a working-man's wife, and probably also the mother of a large family. When, as an infant, Jesus was presented in the Temple, the offering which His parents brought was that which the law prescribed in the case of the poor: "a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons." When He came to manhood, and entered on His public ministry, He had no home He could call His own. In His Father's house, He said, were many mansions; but on earth He had not where to lay His head. Women ministered unto Him of their substance. We never read that He had any money at all. When once He wanted to use a coin as an illustration, He borrowed it; when, at another time, He needed one with which to pay a tax, He wrought a miracle in order to procure it. As He was dying, the soldiers, we are told, parted His garments among them--that was all there was to divide. When He was dead, men buried Him in another's tomb. More literally true than perhaps we always realize was the apostle's saying, "He became poor."

Who, then, will deny that a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth? Yet how strangely materialized our thoughts have become! Our very language has been dragged down and made a partner with us in our fall. When, for example, our Authorized Version was written in 1611, the translators could write, without fear of being misunderstood, "Let no man seek his own, but every man another's wealth" (i Cor. x. 24).^[51] But though the nobler meaning of the word still survives in "well" and "weal," "wealth" to-day is rarely used save to indicate abundance of material good. When Thackeray makes "Becky Sharp" say that she could be good if she had £4000 a year, and when. Mr. Keir Hardie asks if it is possible for a man to be a Christian on a pound a week, the thoughts of many hearts are revealed. There is nothing to be done without money, we think; money is the golden key which unlocks all doors; money is the lever which removes all difficulties. This is what many of us are saying, and what most of us in our hearts are thinking. But clean across these spoken and unspoken thoughts of ours, there comes the life of Jesus, the man of Nazareth, to rebuke, and shame, and silence us. Who in His presence dare speak any more of the sovereign might of money?

This is the lesson of the life of the Best. Is it not also the lesson of the lives of the good in all ages? The greatest name in the great world of Greece is Socrates; and Socrates was a poor man. The greatest name in the first century of the Christian era is Paul; and Paul was a working-man and sometimes in want. It was Calvinism, Mark Pattison said, that in the sixteenth century saved Europe, and Calvin's strength, a Pope once declared, lay in this, that money had no charm for him. John Wesley re-created modern England and left behind him "two silver teaspoons and the Methodist Church." The "Poets' Corner" in Westminster Abbey, it has been said, commemorates a glorious company of paupers. And even in America, the land of the millionaire and multi-millionaire, the names that are graven on the nation's heart, and which men delight to honour, are not its Vanderbilts, or its Jay Goulds, but Lincoln, and Grant, and Garfield, and Webster, and Clay.

This is not mere "curb-stone rhetoric"; I speak the words of soberness and truth. Would that they in whose blood the "narrowing lust of gold" has begun to burn might be sobered by them! In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, and of all the noblest of the sons of men, let us deny and defy the sordid traditions of mammon; let us make it plain that we at least do not believe "the wealthiest man among us is the best." "Godliness with contentment," said the apostle, "is great gain;" and though these are not the only worthy ends of human effort, yet he who has made them his has secured for himself a treasure which faileth not, which will endure when the gilded toys for which men strive and sweat are dust and ashes.

It is further worthy of note that it was always the rich rather than the poor whom Christ pitied. He was sorry for Lazarus; He was still more sorry for Dives. "Blessed are ye poor.... Woe unto you that are rich." This two-fold note sounds through all Christ's teaching. And the reason is not far to seek. As Jesus looked on life, He saw how the passionate quest for gold was starving all the higher ideals of life. Men were concentrating their souls on pence till they could think of nothing else. For mammon's sake they were turning away from the kingdom of heaven. The spirit of covetousness was breaking the peace of households, setting brother against brother, making men hard and fierce and relentless. Under its hot breath the fairest growths of the spirit were drooping and ready to die. The familiar "poor but pious" which meets us so often in a certain type of biography could never have found a place on the lips of Jesus. "Rich but pious" would have been far truer to the facts of life as He saw them. "The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully," and after that he could think of nothing but barns: there was no room for God in his life. "The Pharisees who were lovers of money heard these things; and they scoffed at Him;" of course, what could their jaundiced eyes see in Jesus? And even to one of whom it is written that Jesus, "looking upon him loved him," his great possessions proved a magnet stronger than the call of Christ. It was Emerson, I think, who said that the worst thing about money is that it so often costs so much. To take heed that we do not pay too dearly for it, is the warning which comes to us from every page of the life of Jesus. Are there none of us who need the warning? "Ye cannot serve God and mammon;" we know it, and that we may the better serve mammon, we are sacrificing God and conscience on mammon's unholy altars. And to-day, perhaps, we are content that it should be so. But will our satisfaction last? Shall we be as pleased with the bargain to-morrow and the day after as we think we are to-day? And when our last day comes--what? "Forefancy your deathbed," said Samuel Rutherford; and though the counsel ill fits the mood of men in their youth and strength, it is surely well sometimes to look forward and ask how life will bear hereafter the long look back. "This night is thy soul required of thee; and the things which thou hast prepared whose shall they be?"--not his, and he had nothing else. He had laid up treasure for himself, but it was all of this world's coinage; of the currency of the land whither he went he had none. In one of Lowell's most striking poems he pictures the sad retrospect of one who, through fourscore years, had wasted on ignoble ends God's gift of life; his hands had

"plucked the world's coarse gains
As erst they plucked the flowers of May;"

but what now, in life's last hours, are gains like these?

"God bends from out the deep and says,
'I gave thee the great gift of life;
Wast thou not called in many ways?
Are not My earth and heaven at strife?
I gave thee of My seed to sow,
Bringest thou Me My hundred-fold?'
Can I look up with face aglow,
And answer, 'Father, here is gold'?"

And the end of the poem is a wail:

"I hear the reapers singing go
Into God's harvest; I, that might
With them have chosen, here below
Grope shuddering at the gates of night."

Wherefore let us set not our minds on the things that are upon earth; let us covet earnestly the best gifts; let us seek first the kingdom of God; and all other things in due season and in due measure shall be added unto us.^[52]

CONCERNING THE SECOND ADVENT

"Lo as some venturer, from his stars receiving
Promise and presage of sublime emprise,
Wears evermore the seal of his believing
Deep in the dark of solitary eyes,
Yea to the end, in palace or in prison,
Fashions his fancies of the realm to be,
Fallen from the height or from the deeps arisen,
Ringed with the rocks and sundered of the sea;--
So even I, and with a heart more burning,
So even I, and with a hope more sweet,
Groan for the hour, O Christ! of Thy returning,
Faint for the flaming of Thine advent feet."
F.W.H. MYERS, Saint Paul.

XIV

CONCERNING THE SECOND ADVENT

"They shall see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.... Of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only."--MATT. xxiv. 30, 36.

The doctrine of our Lord's Second Coming occupies at the present moment a curiously equivocal position in the thought of the Christian Church. On the one hand by many it is wholly ignored. There is no conscious disloyalty on their part to the word of God; but the subject makes no appeal to them, it fails to "find" them. Ours is a sternly practical age, and any truth which does not readily link itself on to the necessities of life is liable speedily to be put on one side and forgotten. This is what has happened with this particular doctrine in the case of multitudes; it is not denied, but it is banished to what Mr. Lecky calls "the land of the unrealized and the inoperative." But if, on the one hand, the doctrine has suffered from neglect, on the other it has suffered hardly less from undue attention. Indeed of late years the whole subject of the "Last Things" has been turned into a kind of happy hunting-ground for little sects, who carry on a ceaseless wordy warfare both with themselves and the rest of the Christian world. Men and women without another theological interest in the world are yet keen to argue about Millenarianism, and to try their 'prentice hands on the interpretation of the imagery of the apocalyptic literature of both the Old Testament and the New. As Spurgeon used to say, they are so taken up with the second coming of our Lord that they forget to preach the first So that one hardly knows which to regret more, the neglect and indifference of the one class, or the unhealthy, feverish absorption of the other.

As very often happens in cases of this kind each extreme is largely responsible for the other. Neglect prepares the way for exaggeration; exaggeration leads to further neglect. Moreover, in the case before us, both tendencies are strengthened by the very difficulty in which the subject is involved. Vagueness, uncertainty, mystery, attract some minds as powerfully as they repel others. And, assuredly, the element of uncertainty is not wanting here. In the first place, this is a subject for all our knowledge of which we are wholly dependent upon revelation. Much that Christ and His apostles have taught us we can bring to the test of experience and verify for ourselves. But this doctrine we must receive, if we receive it at all, wholly on the authority of One whom, on other grounds, we have learned to trust. Verification, in the nature of the case, is impossible. Further, we have gone but a little way when revelation itself becomes silent; and, as I have said, when that guide leaves us, we enter at once the dark forest where instantly the track is lost.

Let us seek to learn, then, what Christ has revealed, and what He has left unrevealed, concerning His coming again.