A Classic Study by Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847)     [Here, we continue a study by Thomas Chalmers. It is a discourse on the love of money.]—Ed.       Discourse on the Love of Money, pt. 3 “If I have made gold my hope, or have said to the fine gold, ‘Thou art my confidence’; if I rejoiced because my wealth was great, and because mine hand had gotten much; if I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walking in brightness; and my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand; this also were an iniquity to be punished by the judge; for I should have denied the God that is above” (Job 31:24-28)   To look no further than to fortune as the dispenser of all the enjoyments which money can purchase is to make that fortune stand in the place of God.  It is to make sense shut out faith, and to rob the King eternal and invisible of that supremacy, to which all the blessings of human existence, and all the varieties of human condition, ought, in every instance, and in every particular, to be referred.  But, as we have already remarked, the love of money is one affection, and the love of what is purchased by money is another.  It was, at first, we have no doubt, loved for the sake of good things which it enabled its possessor to acquire.  But whether, as the result of associations in the mind so rapid as to escape the notice of our own consciousness – or as the fruit of an infection running by the sympathy among all men busily engaged in the prosecution of wealth, as the supreme good of their being – certain it is, that money, originally pursued for the sake of other things, comes at length to be prized for its own sake. And perhaps, there is no one circumstance which serves more to liken the love of money to the most irrational of the heathen idolatries, than that it at length passes into the love of money for itself; and acquires a most enduring power over the human affections, separately altogether from the power of purchase and of command which belongs to it, over the proper and original objects of human desire.  The first thing which set man agoing in the pursuit of wealth, was that, through it, as an intervening medium, he found his way to other enjoyments; and it proves him, as we have observed, capable of a higher reach of anticipation than the beasts of the field, or the fowls of the air, that he is thus able to calculate, and to foresee, and to build up a provision for the wants of futurity.  But, mark how soon this boasted distinction of his faculties is overthrown, and how near to each other lie the dignity and the debasement of the human understanding.  If it evinced a loftier mind in man than in the inferior animals, that he invented money, and by the acquisition of it can both secure abundance for himself, and transmit this abundance to the future generations of his family – what have we to offer, in vindication of this intellectual eminence, when we witness how soon it is, that the pursuit of wealth ceases to be rational? How instead of being prosecuted as an instrument, either for the purchase of ease, or the purchase of enjoyment, both the ease and enjoyment of a whole life are rendered up as sacrifices at its shrine? How, from being sought after as a minister of gratification to the appetites of nature, it at length brings nature into bondage, and robes her of all her simple delights, and pours the infusion of wormwood into the currency of her feelings, making that man sad who ought to be cheerful, and that man who ought to rejoice in his present abundance, filling him either with the cares of an ambition which never will be satisfied, or with the apprehensions of a distress which, in all its pictured and exaggerated evils, will never be realized?  And it is amazing that wealth, which derives all that is true and sterling in its worth from its subserviency to other advantages, should, apart from all thought about this subserviency, be made the object of such fervent and fatiguing devotion.  Insomuch, that never did Indian devotee inflict upon himself a severer agony at the footstool of his paganism, than those devotees of wealth who, for its acquirement as their ultimate object, will forego all the uses for which alone it is valuable – will give up all that is genuine or tranquil in the pleasures of life; and will pierce themselves through with many sorrows; and will undergo all the fiercer tortures of the mind; and, instead of employing what they have to smooth their passage through the world, will, upon the hazardous sea of adventure, turn the whole of this passage into a storm – thus exalting wealth, from a servant unto a lord, who in return for the homage that he obtains from his worshippers, exercises them, like Rehoboam his subjects of old, not with whips but with scorpions – with consuming anxiety, with never-sated desire, with brooding apprehension, and its frequent and everflitting specters, and the endless jealousies of competition with men as intently devoted, and as emulous of a high place in the temple of their common idolatry, as themselves.  And without going to the higher exhibitions of this propensity, in all its rage and restlessness, we have only to mark its workings on the walk of even everyday citizenship; and there see, how in the hearts even of its most commonplace votaries, wealth is followed after, for its own sake; how unassociated with all for which reason pronounces it to be of estimation, but, in virtue of some mysterious and undefinable charm, operating not on any principle of the judgment, but on the utter perversity of judgment, money has come to be higher account than all that is purchased by money, and has attained a rank coordinate with that which our Savior assigns to the life and to the body of man, in being reckoned more than meat and more than raiment.  Thus making that which is subordinate to be primary, and that which is primary subordinate; transferring, by a kind of fascination, the affections away from the wealth in use, to wealth in idle and unemployed possession, insomuch that the most welcome intelligence you could give to the proprietor of many a snug deposit, in some place of secure and progressive accumulation, would be, that he should never require any part either of it, or of its accumulation back again for the purpose of expenditure, and that, to the end of his life, every new year should witness another unimpaired addition to the bulk or the aggrandizement of his idol.  And it would just heighten his enjoyment, could he be told, with prophetic certainty, that this process of undisturbed augmentation would go on with his children’s children, to the last age of the world; that the economy of each succeeding race of descendants would leave the sum with its interest untouched, and the place of its sanctuary unviolated; and, that through a series of indefinite generations, would the magnitude ever grow, and the luster ever brighten, of that household god, which he had erected for his own senseless adoration, and bequeathed as an object of as senseless adoration to his family.  [This study will conclude in the next issue (D.V.)]  -------- Chalmers, Thomas.  Discourses on the Application of Christianity to the Commercial and Ordinary Affairs of Life.  From The Works of Thomas Chalmers, Vol. VI.  A PDF file of this book can be downloaded, free of charge, at http://www.ClassicChristianLibrary.com