Now, there is abundance of living strength in Christianity to meet this and all other special wants of the age. There is no doubt that money is the principle of our social gravitation, and we need preachers who will not be afraid to tell us the truth, even though nobody has ever told it just in that particular way before. We accept without demur all that has been said about the evils of loving money; will some of our spiritual teachers tell us how to avoid the evils and cure the 291 moral and physical distress caused by the want of money? That this is a gigantic evil, we have constant proof in the daily papers; in murder, theft, suicide, domestic misery and cruelty. These criminals are far seldomer influenced by the love of money than by the want of it. If instead of being without a dollar, they had had sufficient for their necessities, would they have run such risks, incurred such guilt, staked life on one desperate chance, flung it away in despairing misery?
Of course the word “sufficient” is very elastic. It can be so moderate and temperate; and again it can grasp at impossibilities. “My wants,” said the Count Mirabel, “are few: a fine house, fine carriages, fine horses, a complete wardrobe, the best opera box, the first cook, and plenty of pocket-money—that is all I require.” He thought his desires very temperate; so also did the Scotchman, who, praying for a modest competency, added, “and that there be no mistake, let it be seven hundred pounds a year, paid quarterly in advance.” There are indeed all sorts of difficulties connected with 292 this question, and anybody can find their way into them. But there must also be a way out; and if our guides would survey the ground a little, they would earn and have our thanks. For undoubtedly this want of money is as great a provocation to sin as the love of it. An empty purse is as full of wicked thoughts as an evil heart; and the Father who allotted seven guardian angels to man, and made five of them hover round his pockets—empty or full—knew well his most vulnerable points.
Mission of Household Furniture
Have wood and paper and upholstery really any moral and emotional agencies?
Certainly they have. Not very obvious ones perhaps, but all-pervading and ever-persistent in their character; since there is no day—scarcely an hour—of our lives in which we are not, either passively or consciously, subject to their influences. Our cravings after elegance of form, glimmer and shimmer of light and color, insensibly elevate and civilize us; and the men and women condemned to the monotony of bare walls and unpicturesque surroundings—whether they be devotees in cells, or felons in dungeons—are the less human for the want of these things. The want, then, is a direct moral evil, and a cause of imperfection.
The desire for beautiful surroundings is a natural instinct in a pure mind. How tenaciously people who live in dull streets, and who never see a sunrise, nor a mountain peak, nor an unbroken horizon, cling to it is proved on all sides of us by the picturesqueness which many a mechanic’s wife imparts to her little twelve-feet-square rooms. And it is wonderful with what slender materials she will satisfy this hunger of the eye for beauty and color. A few brightly polished tins, the many-shaded patchwork coverlets and cushions, the gay stripes in the rag carpet, the pot of trailing ivy or scarlet geranium, the shining black stove, with its glimmer and glow of fire and heat, are made by some subtle charm of arrangement both satisfactory and suggestive.
In spite of all arguments about the economy of “boarding,” who does not respect the men or women who, at all just sacrifices, eschew a boarding-house and make themselves a home?