XXXI. *Another pretence for worldly care and labour after riches, is to provide for our families.
You want to leave fortunes to your children, that they may have their share in the figure and shew of the world. Now consider, do you do this on principles of religion, as the best thing you can do, either for yourself or them?
Can you then be said, to have chosen the one thing needful for yourself, or the one thing needful for them, who take such care to put them in a state of life, that is a snare and a temptation, and the most likely of all others, to fill their minds with foolish and hurtful lusts?
Is it your kindness toward them that puts you upon this labour? Consider therefore what this kindness is founded upon? Perhaps it is such a kindness as when tender mothers carry their daughters to plays and balls: such a kindness as when indulgent fathers support their sons in all the expence of their follies. Such kind parents may more properly be called the betrayers and murderers of their children.
You love your children, and therefore you would have them rich. It is said of our blessed Saviour, that he loved the young rich man that came unto him, and therefore he bid him sell all that he had. What a contrariety is here? The love which dwelleth in you, is as contrary to the love which dwelt in Christ as darkness is to light.
We have our Saviour’s express command, to love one another, as he loved us. And can you think you are following this love, when you are giving those things to your children, which he took away from his friends, and which he could not possibly have given them without contradicting the greatest part of his doctrines?
XXXII. *But suppose you succeed in your designs, and leave your children rich, what must you say to them when you are dying? Will you then tell them that you have the same opinion of the value of riches you ever had; that you feel the pleasure of remembring how much thought and care you have taken to acquire them? Will you tell them that you have provided for their ease and softness, their pleasure and indulgence and figure in the world; and that they cannot do better than to eat and drink and take their fill of such enjoyments as riches afford? This would be dying like an Atheist.
If you would die like a Christian, must you not endeavour to fill their minds with your dying thoughts? Must you not tell them that very soon the world will signify no more to them than it does to you? And that there is a vanity, a littleness in the things of this life, which only dying men feel as they ought?
Will you not tell them, that all your own failings, the irregularity of your life, the folly of your tempers, and your failure of Christian perfection, has been owing to wrong opinions of the value of worldly things? And that if you had always seen the world in the same light that you see it now, your life had been devoted to God, and you would have lived in all those holy tempers and heavenly affections in which you now desire to die?
Will you not tell them, that riches spent upon ourselves, either in the pleasures of ease and indulgence, in the vanity of dress, or in state and grandeur, are the bane and destruction of our souls, making us blindly content with dreams of happiness, till death awakes us into real misery?