prevents, are all hard. But his life is spent in making such bargains; and is therefore spent in fraud.

It is also an unceasing course of oppression. The bargains which I have already specified are not fraudulent only, they are cruel. They are made, in innumerable instances, with the poor and suffering; and fill his coffers out of the pittance of want, and the gleanings of the widow and the fatherless. With an iron hand, he grasps the earnings of the necessitous; and snatches and devours on the right hand, and on the left.'

In this oppression his own family take their full share. His coffers indeed are rich; but himself and his family are poor. Often are they denied even the comforts of life; and always that education and those enjoyments which wealth is destined to supply. Their food is mean and stinted. Their clothes are the garb of poverty. The education which they receive is such as forms a menial character, and fits them only for a menial condition. Their comforts are measured out to them, not in streams, but in solitary drops. When they are settled in life, the means of business and enjoyment are supplied to them with so parsimonious a hand, as to cut them off from every useful plan, and every comfortable expectation. If hope at any time shines upon them, it shines only to be overcast. By their parent they are continually mocked with the cup of Tantalus; which they are permitted indeed to touch, but not to taste. When he leaves the world, and is compelled to impart his possessions to them, they find themselves, by a stinted education and shrivelled habits, rendered wholly unable either to enjoy their wealth themselves, or make it useful to others.

4. The covetous man is almost of course a liar.

The great design of the avaricious man, which fills his heart, spreads through his life, and controls all his conduct, is to get as much as he can; at least so far as it can be done legally, and safely. This is the utmost point of honesty ever aimed at by an avaricious man. If this be attained, such a man always regards himself as being really honest. But in this he is wonderfully deceived. His favourite principle conducts him regularly to unceasing fraud, and regularly issues in a course of lying. As it is his aim always to sell for more and buy for less than justice will permit, he of course represents

the value of his own commodities to be greater, and that of his neighbour's to be less, than the truth. As he spends most of his life in buying and selling, or in forming schemes to buy and sell, in this manner; he employs no small part of it either in actual, or intentional lying. To compass the same object also he is equally tempted to misrepresent his own circumstances, the state of the markets, the quality and quantity, the soundness, weight, and measure of the commodities which he sells; and, so far as may be, of those which he buys. Thus the horse, the house, or the land which he is about to buy is, according to his own account, poor, defective, and of little value. But as soon as he chooses to sell it, it has, according to his own account also, wonderfully changed its nature; and become excellent, free from every defect, and of very superior value. Yet, with this chain of falsehoods always hanging about his neck, the miserable wretch is frequently so blind as not to mistrust that he is a liar.

5. All these, and all other sins of the avaricious man speedily become gross and rank habits.

I know of no disposition which sooner or more effectually makes a man blind to his own character, than avarice. The miser rarely, if ever, mistrusts that he is a sinner. He thinks himself only a rich man. He does not dream that he is an oppressor, a liar, and a cheat; but merely supposes himself to be prosperous, sagacious, and skilled in business. With these views he will naturally entertain no thoughts of repentance; and no suspicion that it is necessary for him. His conscience, it is to be remembered, has in the mean time lost its power to remonstrate and to alarm. His heart also is so entirely engrossed by schemes of accumulating wealth, or is rather so absolutely possessed by the demon of avarice, as to have neither time nor room for the admission of a thought concerning reformation. He is left therefore to the domination of this wretched appetite; and becomes fixed and hardened in all his sins, without a check, and without resistance. There is probably no more obdurate heart than that of avarice; and no more hopeless character. Every passage to it appears to be closed up, except one; and that is opened only to gain.

III. The mischiefs of avarice are innumerable.

A few of them only can be even mentioned at the pre

sent time. These I shall consider as personal, private, and public.

Among the personal mischiefs of avarice are to be reckoned all the follies and all the sins which have been already specified, so far as their influence termintes in the avaricious man himself. They are not sins and follies only; they are mischiefs also; as indeed is every other sin and folly. As mischiefs, their combined efficacy is very great, malignant, and dreadful; such as would be deliberately encountered by no man but a profligate; such as would make a considerate man tremble.

To these let me add the guilt and misery of discontentment and envy. However fast the wealth of the avaricious man may increase, to whatever size the heaps may swell, his accumulations always lag behind his wishes. Indeed, they never keep pace with what he feels to be his due. In his own view he has a right to be rich; and he regards the providence of God as under a species of obligation to make him rich. To these claims his wishes furnish the only limit: and whenever they are not satisfied; as is always the case, unless in the moment of some distinguished success; he becomes fretful, impatient, and angry at the dispensations of Providence. He may not, indeed, accuse God of injustice, face to face. But he murmurs at his Providence under the names of fortune, chance, luck, the state of things, and the course of events. Against these, and through these against God, his complaints are loud, vehement, bitter, full of resentment, and full of impiety.

Amid the troubles derived from this source he cannot fail, whenever he looks around him, to find some men happier, as well as more prosperous, at least in some respects, than himself. This man may be richer. That, though inferior in wealth, may possess a piece of land, a house, a servant, which, although a darling object of his covetous desires, he may be unable to obtain. A third may have more reputation. A fourth may have more influence. A fifth may be better beloved. Towards any or all of these, his envy may be directed with as malignant a spirit as his murmuring against God. It is not easy to conceive of a mind more wretched, or more odious than that which makes itself miserable at the sight of happiness enjoyed by others; and pines at the thought of en

joyments which are not its own. This spirit is the vulture of Prometheus, preying unceasingly upon his liver; which was for ever renewed, that it might be for ever devoured.

With envy, discontentment, its twin-sister, perpetually dwells. The wretch, whose heart is the habitation of both, is taught and influenced by them to believe, that God is his enemy, because he does not minister to his covetousness; and that men are his enemies, because they enjoy the good which God has given them. Even happiness itself, so delightful wherever it is seen, to a benevolent eye, is a source of anguish only to him, unless when locked up in his own coffers.

The grovelling and gross taste of the miser is in my view also eminently pernicious. To be under the government of such a taste is plainly to be cut off from all rich and refined enjoyment. The miser endeavours to satiate himself upon the dross of happiness. But he neither discerns nor seeks for the fine gold.' The delicious viands proffered to intelligent and immortal minds by the beneficence of God, are lost upon a palate which can satiate itself upon garbage. The delightful emotions of contentment, gratitude, and complacency towards his Maker, the sweets of a self-approving mind, the charming fruition of tenderness and sympathy, the refined participation of social good, and the elevated satisfaction which springs instinctively from the beneficent promotion of that good, can never find an entrance into a heart, all the avenues to which are barred up by the hand of avarice. But to lose these blessings is to lose infinitely.

At the same time, the miser wastes of course his day of probation. His life is wholly occupied by the pursuit of wealth. Of sin and ruin, of holiness and heaven, he has not time even to think. His life is too short for the accomplishment of his main object. Suns for him rise too late, and set too soon. Too rapidly do his days succeed each other, and too early do they terminate their career. His last sickness arrests him while he is counting his gold; and death knocks at his door, while he is in the midst of a gainful bargain. Thus he is hurried and goaded through the journey of life by his covetousness; and finds no opportunity to pause, and think upon the concerns of his soul; no moment in which he can withdraw his eye from gain, and cast a look toward heaven. It is easier,' saith our Saviour, for a camel to go through the eye

of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.'

Thus it is evident, that they that will be rich, fall into temptation, and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition;'-that the love of money is the root of all evil;'-and that such, as covet after it, pierce themselves through with many sorrows.' The private mischiefs of avarice are those which affect unhappily the interests of families and neighbourhoods.

To these little circles, formed to be happy, and actually the scenes of the principal happiness furnished by this world, the miser is a common nuisance. To his family he presents the miserable example of covetousness, fraud, oppression, falsehood, and impiety; and the most humiliating and distressing living picture of an abandoned worldling, forgetting his God and forgotten by him; worshipping gold; ever craving and devouring, but never satisfied; denying himself and his household the comforts of life, and imparting to them the necessaries only in crumbs and shreds; living a life of perpetual meanness and debasement; wasting the day of probation; ' treasuring up wrath against the day of wrath;' advancing onward to his final account, without an effort or a thought of preparation for this tremendous event; and, all this while irresistibly endeared to them by the strong power of natural affection.

On the neighbourhood the miser inflicts the complicated, harassing, and intense, evils of continually repeated fraud and oppression. Wherever such a man plants himself, sufferings spring up all around him. To the young, the ignorant, the thoughtless, and the necessitous, he lends money at exorbitant interest, and with ten-fold security. The payment he discourages, until the amount has become sufficient to enable him with a suit to enclose their whole possessions in his net. To the poor and suffering also he sells at unconscionable prices the necessaries of life. Notes, bonds, and mortgages given by persons of the same description, he buys at an enormous discount. Of estates left intestate he watchfully seeks, and with art and perseverance obtains, the administration. When others are obliged to buy, he sells; and when others are obliged to sell, he buys. In this manner his loans are almost instantaneously doubled; and property mortgaged to him for a tenth part of its value is swallowed up. The estates of