and antisocial criminals of every kind. It stirs up wars of conquest, robs whole nations and stares in stolid indifference while its victims starve by the million. It is more insatiable than lust, and more cruel than revenge. It considers faith, honor and truth, purity and innocence, patriotism and religion as wares to be bought and sold. It is in sum atheism, which, turning from God and the soul, drives its votaries in a kind of brutish madness to strive to clutch the universe of matter, deluding them with the superstition that the more they grasp and call their own the greater they become. Their personality seems to grow as the circle of their possessions enlarges, as though a man's money could be himself.
Greed, in drying up the fountains of noble life within, reduces its slaves to a kind of machine, whose one office is to get gold. It degrades all their impulses and passions. They are not ambitious of glory or fame or honor, or of any noble kind of influence or power, but all their ambition falls upon matter. Their sole desire, their one thought, is to amass wealth. They are not jealous of those who excel them in moral or intellectual qualities, who have more faith or genius or virtue than they, but of those alone who have greater possessions. They are decadent, they are degenerate. But the world is so prone to this superstition that public opinion measures by commercial standards not only the worth and importance of individuals, but the strength and civilization of nations. The ideal is the ever-increasing production and distribution of what ministers to man's physical needs,—everything for the body, nothing for the soul; everything for enjoyment, nothing for virtue.
Blessed be Christ, who, being rich, became poor that He might reveal the wealth there is in the life of the spirit, in love and righteousness, in truth and holiness; that He might make it plain that the kingdom of heaven is within us; that it is wherever God is known, obeyed and loved, though the setting be the stable, the workshop or the cross; that the right kind of man makes a fair world wherever he is thrown, while the weak and the doubting seek comfort in lamentations over their lot or deliver themselves up to the service of Mammon and the tyranny of the senses. The
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