that and serve God at the same time. Yet was Mammon never worshiped more ardently than at this day. The supreme love and pursuit of wealth is the great crying sin of this age, and carrying, perhaps, greater numbers down to the pit, than all other evils combined. For, cheating, lying, fraud, deception, cunning, envy, jealousy, meanness, and a host of other evils, follow in its train; and these drag the soul down to destruction. They deprive it of everything spiritual, and of all love for what is spiritual: they shut the ears against preaching and the Word of God; they render the mind indifferent to everything but what is earthly and temporal: they make religion a mere form, and worship a mockery: they harden the heart against the entrance of every noble aspiration. When a young man has fixed it in his mind to make a fortune, and taken that for his end,—woe to him! he is an idolater, and has broken the first Commandment, and thus will be easily led to break all the rest. He has taken Mammon for his God, and turned his back on heaven, and his path is downward. In twenty or fifty years, he will be in that evil place whither myriads have gone before him.
The world is full of such idolatry: what shall we do? I will tell you what you that hear me can do for yourselves. If you are a young man,—whenever the thought of getting rich comes into your mind, and you find it beginning to become your principal end in life—drive it away, as you would a monster that would devour you. And pray the Lord to help you drive it away. Let your only end be, to be an upright and
