The Responsibilities of Wealth.
The simple giving of money for great public or for charitable purposes is the discharge of only one, and not the most important duty connected with wealth. Men have founded useful and benevolent institutions and scattered money quite freely among the poor, whose personal influence has been far from wholesome. Wealth brings special temptations to the person endowed with it. It affords the means of gratifying the appetites, which it stimulates. It creates an insatiable desire for further accumulations. It brings the person almost necessarily into the society of utterly worldly men. It loads the mind and life with such incessant burdens that opportunities for thoughtful, religious meditation and social services are crowded aside. The relief it gives from a sense of constant dependence upon God for the support of the daily life occasions the absence of that continued filial trust in an imminent special Providence out of which heart-felt prayer is born. The multiplied comforts with which it can surround its earthly life dim the brightness of the concealed glory of the heavenly mansions. These things sometimes make dying terrible. They so benumb as well as burden the spiritual life as to give solemn emphasis to the Saviour's words: "How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God."—Zion's Herald.