" And that
such a surfeit has fallen upon the rich of this land, is a fact; for that
this is the tone of to-day, and that the tone increases, none can deny
who knows that which calls itself the WORLD, and calls itself so only too
truly; the world of which it is written, that all that is in the world--
the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life--
is not of the Father, but of the world. And the world passeth away, and
the lust thereof. But he who doeth the will of God, he alone abideth for
ever.
God grant that we, who have just seen the most cunningly organized and
daintily bedizened specimen of a world, which ever flaunted on the earth
since men began to build their towers of Babel, collapse and crumble at a
single blow, may take God's hint, that the fashion of this world passeth
away. Let the idle, the frivolous, the sensual, and those who, like
Figaro's Marquis, have earned all earthly happiness by only taking the
trouble to be born--let them look back on this last awful Christmas-tide,
and hear, speaking in fact unmistakeable, the voice of the Lord.
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