Or those,
again, who for six days in the week are absorbed in making money--
honestly if they can, no doubt, but still making money, and living
luxuriously on their profits--and on the seventh listen with satisfaction
to preachers and hymns which tell them that this world is all a howling
wilderness, full of snares and pitfalls; and that in this wretched place
the Christian can expect nothing but tribulation and persecution till he
"crosses Jordan, and is landed safe on Canaan's store," and so forth.
My friends, my friends, as long as a man talks so, blaspheming God's
world--which, when He made it, behold it was all very good--and laying
the blame of their own ignorance and peevishness on God who made them,
they must expect nothing but tribulation and sorrow. But the tribulation
and the sorrow will be their own fault, and not God's. If religious
professors will not take St. Peter's advice and the Psalmist's advice; if
they will go on coveting and scheming about money, and how they may get
money; if they will go on being neither pitiful, courteous, nor
forgiving, and hating and maligning whether it be those who differ from
them in doctrine, or those who they fancy have injured them, or those who
merely are their rivals in the race of life; then they are but too likely
to find this world a thorny place, because they themselves raise the
thorns; and a disorderly place, because their own tempers and desires are
disorderly; and a wilderness, because they themselves have run wild,
barbarians at heart, however civilised in dress and outward manners.
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