The true value of wealth to the soul--a value difficult to over-estimate--is that it provides opportunity for, and encourages the cultivation of, that virtue which is "the greatest of all these"; that virtue which "suffereth long and is kind; which vaunteth not itself and is not puffed up"-- Charity, in short.

While not denying the simple joys of penury, nor forgetting the Saviour's promises to the poor and meek and lowly, it is still easy to understand that charity is less likely to be a vigorous soul-growth in a poor man than in a rich.

The poor man may possess it as a germ, a seed; but the rich man is, through superior prowess in the struggle for existence, in a position to cultivate this virtue; and who will say that he has not cultivated it?
Certainly no one acquainted with the efforts of our wealthy men to uplift the worthy poor.

A certain modern sentimentality demands that poverty be abolished--ignoring those pregnant words of Jesus--"the poor ye have _always_ with you"-- forgetting, indeed, that human society is composed of unequal parts, even as the human body; that equality exists among the social members only in this: that all men have their origin in God the Creator, have sinned in Adam, and have been, by the sacrificial blood of God's only begotten Son, born of the Virgin Mary, equally redeemed into eternal life, if they will but accept Christ as their only true Saviour;--forgetting indeed that to abolish poverty would at once prevent all manifestations of human nature's most beauteous trait and virtue--Charity.
Present echoes from the business world indicate that the poor man to-day, with his vicious discontent, his preposterous hopes of trades-unionism, and his impracticable and very _un-Christian_ dreams of an industrial millennium, is the true and veritable Dives, rich in arrogance and poor in that charity of judgment which the millionaire has so abundantly shown himself to possess.
The remedy was for the world to come up higher.

Standing upon one of the grand old peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the speaker had once witnessed a scene in the valley below which, for beauty of illustration of the thought in hand, the world could not surpass.