Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/13

Rh The merchants build mainly the churches, endow theological schools; they furnish the material sinews of the church. Hence the metropolitan churches are, in general, as much commercial as tho shops. Now, from this position, there come certain peculiar temptations. One is to an extravagant desire of wealth. They see that money is power, the most condensed and flexible form thereof. It is always ready; it will turn any way. They see that it gives advantages to their children which nothing else will give. The poor man's son, however well-born, struggling for a superior education, obtains his culture at a monstrous cost; with the sacrifice of pleasure, comfort, the joys of youth, often of eyesight and health. He must do two men's work at once—learn and teach at the same time. He learns all by his soul, nothing from his circumstances. If he have not an iron body in well as an iron head, he dies in that experiment of the cross. The land is full of poor men who have attained a superior culture, but carry a crippled body through all their life. The rich man's eon needs not that terrible trial. He. learns from his circumstances, not his soul. The air about him contains a diffused element of thought. He learns without knowing it. Colleges open their doors; accomplished teachers stand ready science and art, music and literature, come at the rich man's call. All the outward means of educating, refining, elevating a child, are to be had for money, and for money alone.

Then, too, wealth gives men a social position, which nothing else save the rarest genius can obtain, and which that, in the majority of cases lacking the commercial conscience, is sure not to get. Many men prize this social rank above everything else, even above justice and a life unstained. Since it thus gives power, culture for one's children, and a distinguished social position, rank amongst men, for the man and his child after him, there is a temptation to regard money as the great object of life, not a means but an end; the thing a man is to get, even at the risk of getting nothing else. "It answereth all things," Here and there you find a man who has got nothing else. Men say of such a one, "He is worth a million!" There is a ter-