the practical life of holiness, if they heap up treasures, not to use for their own eternal good by applying them to their inward purification, such ones, when they are told that perfection consists in going and selling all that they have and giving to the poor, or in expending their riches of knowledge to nourish and feed the spiritual affections of love and charity, like the young man in the Gospel, go away sorrowful. How hardly, then, shall rich men, in this sense, enter the kingdom of heaven! They vainly think, that by their vast riches of science and knowledge—their great possessions—they can penetrate the refined and pure truths of spiritual life; but the Lord says, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle," than this can be done. The needle's eye is here named to denote spiritual truth, such as relates to inward purity and heaven; and the camel, as a bulky beast of burden, the mass of outward or natural knowledge which cannot penetrate the precincts of spiritual truth and life. Hence the attempt to enter the heavenly state by knowledge without life is a vain and useless work, and is called in Zech. xiv. 15, "The plague of the horse, the mule, the camel, and the ass." Knowledge alone puffeth up, and makes us stand erect in pride, like an empty ear of corn; but knowledge applied to life creates wisdom, and the man, like the full corn in the ear, then bows down the head and is humble.
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