Continual success commonly hardens the heart, and almost always enervates the character. The politician whose office is not contested, the merchant who has a monopoly, the minister without a rival, the farmer with acres too wide and more fertile than is enough, all these are in peril. So are such as acquire money with too rapid swiftness, and every man to whose house sorrow does not now and then come in to wish him good morrow. Excess of good fortune is our undoing.
A benevolent man whom I knew, very familiar with the hearts of men, was on his way, one morning, to ask a charity of a wealthy citizen of the town, when he learned that in the three months just passed by, that merchant had added the tenth part of a million of dollars to his fortune. My friend said, “I go on a fool's errand,” and turned back and asked not the charity.
Religion does not enter at the golden gate of a man's house; she comes in some other way—comes with the doctor or with the sheriff. “He went away sorrowful,” says the New Testament, “for he had great possessions.” A man reputed a millionaire, in a large trading town of America, four or five years ago, used to make a mock of religion. He never entered a meeting-house for many a year. Charity did not open his crowded purse, nor his shrivelled heart. But a commercial crisis made him a bankrupt, and then religious emotions broke from their golden fetters, and he sought his God again. An underground railroad conducted this slave of money to a large place where there was room for his soul, and he was made free from the bondage of the flesh, by the law of the spirit of life. In his native town men mocked when they saw him again at the old parish meeting-house, in his mother's long-forgotten seat. It was a foolish laugh; they should have known that the blind man had received his sight. Was it not to such an one that the greatest of teachers said, “Go and sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor, and then shalt thou have treasure in heaven?”
You see the same thing in a town or nation. Virtue
does not grow very tall, nor flower very fair in an
over-prosperous State. In the time of success a nation is never
well ruled; the people choose low men with low aims;
