July 5

"I gathered me also silver and gold."—Ecclesiastes 2:8.

THERE is much which money will never gain for me; and why then should I weary myself to accumulate it?

It cannot buy the peace of home. It is not wealth that wins me the truest friends, the souls to whom I can cling in calm and stormy weather—a sister to suffer long with me, a brother to defend me, a wife to pardon and cheer and prompt and inspire. The gold and diamonds of Ormuz and of Ind will fail to purchase one of these consummate treasures.

It cannot buy the peace of heart. "The world," James Renwick said, in his quaint seventeenth-century English, "will never fill the heart of man, for the heart is three-cornered, and the world is round." There must remain angles and nooks unoccupied and empty, possessed rather by poverty and misery and confusion and sin. The richest man may be the unhappiest man. Rest of conscience and mind and soul is not one of the wares of the market-place, to be purchased by my purse.

It cannot buy the peace of God. His forgiveness does not come to me in response to my gifts and labours and penances. His fellowship is not secured with any equivalents which I think I can offer. His holiness is not sold over a counter. These best boons are free—free as the air and the dew and the sunlight. God is given away; heaven is mine for the asking.

So I will not hanker after money, but rather after the blessings which money cannot procure. In this age, when many go careworn through the day and lie awake the long night scheming and dreaming, I will pray, Give me neither poverty nor riches.