Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/115

102 is stronger, the calculation more intense, and there is the habit of covetousness, eighty years old. The accumulated fall of eighty winters gives his covetousness such a momentum as carries him with swiftly accelerated speed down into the bottomless pit of hunkerism. He has no care for right and justice: no love for mankind; none for God. Mammon is his sole divinity, that Godhead a trinity of coin. What an end of what a life! His grey hairs cover only an estate ; he is worth nothing.

Did you ever see the old age of a covetous man who for eighty years had gathered gold, and nothing more? I have seen more than one such. It is the sin of New England. I spoke of poverty the other day ; of want which I saw in the cellars of Broad Street and Burgess Alley, in the attics of the North End Block. There is no want so squalid, no misery of poverty so desperate, as the consciousness of an old miser, in his old age of covetousness. Pass him by.

Here is an old man who in his long time has sought only power and place, and thence-accruing fame. His passion was all ambition, his calculation only for place and name. With strange fire he sacrificed youth and manhood on this unholy altar. He has not yet won the place he longs for, nor never will. He sets his hungry eye on it, and grows more reckless in the means that seem to lead thereto, "for he knoweth that his time is short," Nothing stands between him and what he aims at. Friendship is nothing; his plighted word is only the oath of a dicer who throws for place. His past life is nothing; he will eat his own words, though hard as cannon-shot. His conscience is nothing; his affections nothing ; his soul nothing; and his God—that is a word to swear by, and beguile the people with. He knows no Higher Law—only the passion of the many, the ambition of the few.

I have seen the old age of such; I remember their faces the face of a volcano, rent with hidden fires, scarred and streaked with the ruin they had thrown out from their own ambition! God save you from such an end, and me!

Look around you and see men conspicuous in American politics to-day—men whose passions of the flesh time has cooled, and tamed, and chilled, and frozen through; but