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its vast tables loaded with rich viands and fruits and garnished with flowers, and over all this mart presides. In all the world there is not one, no not even the humblest and the poorest, to whose care God has not allotted some portion of His wealth. The rich administer His larger interests, humanly speaking, but the poor also have intrusted to them a life in comparison with which the whole earth is valueless, a soul for which ten thousand worlds would be an inadequate exchange, and time — the golden key to the treasuries of heaven. In the order of grace, too, our stewardship includes the gifts of the true faith, the sacrifice and the sacraments of our Church, the communion of God's saints, and the infinite merits of our Redeemer. But both in the order of Nature and of grace we easily forget that we are stewards, and we soon begin to waste by selfish extravagance or neglect our Master's goods. The rich feel, or at least they act, as though they were absolute lords of all they possess, for, while Lazarus is being hunted from the door, Dives, in purple and fine linen, is feasting sumptuously. And yet Dives's superfluous wealth belongs by right to the Lord and to the poor with whom Christ identified Himself when He said: " Amen, I say to you, as long as you did not charity nor justice to these, My least brethren, neither did you them to Me." Nor is the stewardship of the poor over their eternal interests always above reproach, though, truth to say, they are generally the more faithful, for man's fidelity to God is usually in inverse ratio to God's liberality to man. The old