to show, that although men may occasionally be heard pleading their extravagance to clear themselves from the charge of cupidity, it yet originates in the same cause, produces precisely the same effects, employs the same sinful means of gratification, and incurs the same doom. They must be covetous, that they may be prodigal: one hand must collect, that the other may have wherewith to scatter: covetousness, as the steward to prodigality, must furnish supplies, and is often goaded into rapacity that it may raise them. Thus prodigality strengthens covetousness by keeping it in constant activity, and covetousness strengthens prodigality by slavishly feeding its voracious appetite. Taking possession of the heart, "they divide the man between them," each in turn becoming cause and effect. But prodigal self-indulgence not only produces cupidity, it stands to every benevolent object in the same relation as avarice-it has nothing to give. A system of extravagant expenditure renders benevolence impossible, and keeps a man constantly poor towards God.

SECTION III.

PREVALENCE OF COVETOUSNESS.

To the charge of covetousness, under one or other of these various forms, how large a proportion of mankind, and even of professing Christians, must plead guilty! It is true, indeed, that all these modifications of covetousness cannot co-exist in the same mind, for some of them are destructive of each other and such is the anxiety of men to escape from the hateful charge entirely, that, finding they are exempt from some of its forms, they flatter themselves that they are guiltless of all. But this delusion, in most cases, only indicates the mournful probability, that the evil, besides having taken up its abode within them, has assumed there a form and a name so plausible, as not merely to

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escape detection, but even to secure to itself the credit of a virtue, and the welcome of a friend.

In the eyes of the world, a man may acquire, and through a long life maintain, a character for liberality and spirit, while his heart all the time goeth after his covetousness. His hand, like a channel, may be ever open; and because his income is perpetually flowing through it, the unreflecting world, taken with appearances, hold him up as a pattern of generosity; but the entire current is absorbed by his own selfishness. That others are indirectly benefited by his profusion, does not enter into his calculations; he thinks only of his own gratification. It is true his mode of living may employ others; but he is the idol of the temple, they are only priests in his service; and the prodigality they are empowered to indulge in, is only intended to decorate and do honour to his altar. To maintain an expensive establishment, to carry it high before the world, to settle his children respectably in life, to maintain a system of costly self-indulgence, these are the objects which swallow up all his gains, and keep him in a constant fever of ill-concealed anxiety; filling his heart with envy and covetousness at the

sight of others' prosperity; rendering him loath to part with a fraction of his property to benevolent purposes; making him feel as if every farthing of his money so employed were a diversion of that farthing from the great ends of life; and causing him even to begrudge the hallowed hours of the Sabbath as so much time lost (if, indeed, he allows it to be lost) to the cause of gain. New channels of benevolence may open around him in all directions; but as far as he is concerned, those channels must remain dry, for, like the sands of the desert, he absorbs all the bounty which Heaven rains on him, and still craves for more. What but this is commonly meant by the expression concerning such a man, that "he is living up to his income?" The undisguised interpretation is, that he is engrossing to himself all that benevolence which should be diffused throughout the world; that he is appropriating all that portion of the divine bounty with which he has been intrusted, and which he ought to share with the rest of mankind; and that he is thus disabling himself for all the calls and claims of Christian charity. Alas! that so large a proportion of professing Christians should be, at this moment, systematically incapa

citating themselves for any thing more than scanty driblets of charity, by their unnecessary expenditure, their extravagant self-indulgence. Where avarice, or hoarding, has slain its thousands, a lavish profusion has slain its tens of thousands; and where the former robs the cause of God of a mite, the latter robs it of a million.

A man may defy a charge of avarice, in the aggravated sense of that term, to be substantiated against him. Indeed, a miser, in the sense in which the character is ordinarily portrayed, is a most unusual prodigy; a monster rarely found but in description. "His life is one long sigh for wealth: he would coin his life-blood into gold: he would sell his soul for gain." Now, the injurious effect of such exaggerated representations is, that men, conscious that their parsimony does not resemble such a character, acquit themselves of the charge of covetousness altogether. Unable to recognise in this disguised and distorted picture of the vice their own likeness, they flatter themselves into a belief of their entire innocence; as if the vice admitted of no degrees, and none were guilty if not as guilty as possible.

But though a man may not merit to be deno