Nor was the war with Spain any exception to this rule. If we absolve the United States from any motive of greed in our claim that the struggle was purely humanitarian in its character, we must still grant that the heavy taxes assessed against her Western colonies by the Spanish government led to the series of revolutions that occasioned our interference. Thus do we find that somewhere in the heart of each war there was the lurking passion for gold. When we make up the mournful lists of the many thousands whose lives have gone out in these contests, we can debit them against the spirit of greed. Milton in Paradise Lost represents that the rebellion in heaven was caused by the like lust, and that Satan’s eyes were ever bent in anxious desire toward the very gold of the streets! Milton’s imagination concerning heaven stands for the historical fact about earth. The demon of greed is usually the demon of war.
The great problems of current national life all trench upon the same influence. If money be not the principal in each of them it comes in as an important confederate. The tariff problem, the currency problem, the canal tolls problem, the trust problem—all these are quickly classified by their names. The cleavage between American political parties for the last fifty years has been made by a wedge of gold. Tariff, or coinage, or trusts—these have been the large words of political speech. In the problems that have a more apparent moral bearing the same commercial element appears. The Labor Problem is with us quite as acutely as it was with the Romans when long ago the plebeians left the city and camped on the hillsides, leaving the patricians to do their own manual toil. Whether the employer gives too little or the employee asks too much in any given struggle, the demon of greed plays his part again. In the Temperance Problem the case is even clearer. Distillers and brewers and saloonists do not enter their trade because they thereby add either to their social standing or to their moral peace. We cannot eliminate from the problem the factor of the human appetite that craves a stimulant; at the same time we know that the motive for the business itself comes from the lure of gold. That gleam invites many men into a path which, as they themselves know well, cannot lead to any large political preferment or to any great personal admirations.
The problem of social purity is, of course, related to another human passion. But there has crept into the vocabulary of the people a suggestive phrase, “commercialized vice.” There is the general feeling that, if the element of monetary profit could be taken from the loathsome trade, the problem would be much nearer its solution. Hence we have our Red Light Abatement Laws by which we seek to make it dangerous for men to rent their property for the traffic in virtue. On the legal side the present efforts at the solution of the problem all strive to fix a set of conditions, making commercially unprofitable the house of her whose feet take hold on death. If, as is earnestly contended by some, low wages tend to furnish the recruits for the pitiable ranks of the trade in bodies, we have another commercial factor in the campaign. Explain it as we may, it is still true that money makes the unholy alliances. It is no marvel that the Bible has sent down to all the centuries its phrase, “the mammon of unrighteousness.”
Of course, many will overstate the case of American greed. The Almighty Dollar is not our God. Our passing celebrities may be mere millionaires, but our permanent heroes were quite more than traders. If we have seemed more commercial than other peoples it has been because a new continent gave such sweeping opportunities for wealth. Some one has said that it is an evidence of the degeneracy of our period that the word “worth,” which once had a noble and inner significance, is now controlled by the market. The fact that the word has gone downhill is taken to mean that the people who use it so have gone downhill too! But these verbal arguments are not reliable. While the word “worth” has dropped somewhat from its old glory, the word “talent,” which once had merely a monetary significance, has mounted to a higher meaning. The one word is just as good a witness as the other. The truth is that we meet to-day the world-old problem. The evidence of this lies in the fact that the Bible dealt with the problem in emphatic fashion. It lists for us the victims of greed: Lot, Gehazi, Ananias and Sapphira, Simon Magus, the young ruler, Judas. We shall find in its pages some general principles by which it seeks to warn wealth away from pitfalls and to send it forth to service.
The first of these principles is that God is the only and absolute Owner. Our human conceit makes for us another theory, and our legal codes write out that theory in complicated formulas. We have our “clear titles” and our “quitclaim deeds.” Formal records at a courthouse tell men that we “own” houses and lands, while formal certificates assert our right to so many shares of stock or so much value in bonds. The Bible confronts our complacency with its plea for the ownership of Another. God has the only clear titles! God has never put his signature to a quitclaim deed! The courthouse record is a temporary convenience; the higher record gives the eternal fact. “The silver and the gold” are God’s. “The cattle on a thousand hills” are God’s. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” There is here not merely the assertion of a property ownership, but an assertion of the ownership of the very men who think that they own the property! The sea and the land are the possessions of God. So spiritual a prelude as that to the Gospel of John claims a divine dominion, while many words could be quoted from both Testaments which make God the one august Possessor. The history of all our materials leads us back to God alone. He fashioned the wood in the forests. He stored the coal and iron in the hills. He packed the fertility in the soil. When we look for the source of the medium of exchange we must go back of men to God himself. We pursue the gold coin to the bank, and then to the mint, and then to the mine, only to hear the silent proclamation of the gold itself that it is of God. When congregations sing:
All things come of thee, O God,
And of thine own have we given thee,
it is not an instance of poetic license in reverence; it is sober fact expressed in worship.
The claim of the Bible for the divine ownership is still more comprehensive. All property is his; all men are his. There is, too, a bent of human power which God confers. We are in the habit of speaking of “gifted” men. The meaning of the word in its usual connection must be that God gives certain powers to men—to one the power of poetry, to another the power of moving speech, and to another the power of scientific and inventive insight. Now there is a suggestive verse in Deuteronomy which declares that it is the Lord God that “giveth thee power to get this wealth.” The “thee” is collective and refers to the people; but the rule applies as well to the individual. There is no reason for supposing that poetic genius or oratorical genius or inventive genius is a gift, while financial genius is an achievement. Yet there are probably no men who are more inclined to call themselves “self-made” than are the men who pass from poverty into vast wealth. Their complacency would be diminished, and their humility would be increased, if they perceived that all property belongs to God, that they themselves belong to God, and that their “power to get this wealth” comes from God. We find, then, that the first sweeping principle which the Scriptures give concerning wealth is that God is its inclusive and ceaseless owner.
The second principle follows as a matter of course. God being the absolute owner, man is a trustee, a lessee, a borrower. When the man in the New Testament asked, “Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?” he may not have reached a worthy definition either of “lawful” or of “mine own.” He may have deemed a loan a final gift, a lease a purchase, a possession a creation, a stewardship an ownership. It is just this error that more than any other leads to the abuse of wealth. We treat it as “personal property,” and the “personal” looks selfward rather than Godward. This was the blunder of the foolish rich man. His ground brought forth plentifully. His crops could not be crowded into his granaries. He resolved to tear down his barns and to build greater. He told his soul to eat, drink, and be merry, for that it had much goods laid up for many years. Then came the sentence of eviction. In a moment the man discovered that he was a tenant and not an owner. “Whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?” This is the question that every man of means must ask. Wills are never shrewd enough to secure the property for the dead. Jesus said that the man who acted on the idea that wealth was his own was a “fool.” He missed the primary point of the divine ownership, and he missed the secondary point of the human trusteeship. All his work was based on impossibilities; and surely this is the supreme foolishness.
This lesson is impressed upon men when they return to their former places of residence after an absence of many years. They recall who “owned” yonder house, yonder farm, yonder lot, yonder block. The old “owners” are gone, and the new “owners” have come. Changes of apparent ownership have been entered in the civil records; but these in their turn will be changed. The procession of trustees moves down through the millenniums; above the trusteeships is one changeless Owner. “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out”—this is the surest of edicts. It is said that one of the wealthiest of men in our nation called his wife to his bedside just before he passed away and asked her to sing to him, “Come, ye sinners, poor and needy.” The man knew that in a few moments he would be stripped of every earthly possession. It was a pungent reply made when one man asked another how much a certain rich man had left—“All he had!” was the response. Even so. Whenever any person shall make a stout claim for his ownership of property, it is a wholesome lesson if he be asked to postpone the discussion for a hundred years!