The lust of money

When the apostle to the Gentiles wrote to Timothy that “the love of money is the root of all evil,” he stated a great metaphysical fact in the fewest and simplest of words. The full significance of the saying has rarely been grasped. It is somewhat doubtful if it was grasped at all in the centuries between the day on which it was written and the discovery of Christian Science. For the simple fact is that whilst money to the man in the street represents pleasure or freedom, license or charity, or a hundred other things, money to the Christian metaphysician means the counterfeit of substance, and so, of life.

Looked at from the point of view of the philosophy of this world, Bacon summed the matter up with his usual conciseness, when he described riches as the baggage of virtue, explaining that he meant by that something which could not well be left behind, but which nevertheless constituted a hindrance. Such a definition, however, no matter how clever, is essentially superficial, and bears no resemblance at all to the searching analysis of the apostle. The apostle neglected unessentials for fundamentals. He realized that the struggle for money was not, at the bottom, a mere craving for the indulgence of sensual appetites, but that it was inspired by fear, the fear of death, which is the belief of life in matter. The original hunter did not go out to kill for the sake of mere amusement. He went out to kill for the sake of maintaining his belief that life had to be fed upon death, that the animal had to be sacrificed to preserve the life of the man. Gradually, as the fear of starvation and death was obliterated, the element of pure sport entered into the great game of killing, until mankind generally abandoned the profession of killing to the butcher, the poulterer, and the fishmonger, and devoted themselves to sheer unnecessary killing, frequently of animals that could not be eaten, purely in the name of sport.

It has been just the same with money. First men have sought money as a means of procuring food, raiment, and shelter. As, however, these have been secured, the demand for seeming essentials has spread to the demand for obvious unessentials. The cave has developed into a castle; the dinner provided by the huntsmen into the banquet prepared by the chef; the garment of skins, for one of brocade. Nevertheless the fundamental demand is the demand of the human animal—food, clothing, and covering, and all these because they stand between the human being and his belief of death, owing to the human being’s belief of life in matter.

In those primitive days before gold, silver, copper, or paper were glorified as “legal tender,” a man exchanged an ox for a bow, or a goat for a tent. The Phœnicians brought jet into England, and took back with them the tin of Cornwall, just as to-day the African exchanges his ivory for rum. In those days a man counted his riches in his herd or his flocks, his drinking vessels or his slaves, so that the wise man, who was a king in Jerusalem, has summed up in his writings the extent of all his possessions, so that he might dismiss them all as vanities. Even his human wisdom he eventually dismissed as vanity, declaring that the only riches were a knowledge of Principle; the only happiness, obedience to divine law: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.”

Now the apostle John has insisted on the fact that God is Love. It follows inevitably, therefore, that it is impossible to be afraid of Love in the ordinary sense of fear. What, then, most undoubtedly the wise man was saying came to this: Understanding what God, Principle, is, a man, not for fear of punishment by God, but from the point of view of ordinary intelligence, which assures him of the futility of denying that two and two are four, will, not less for common sense reasoning than for very love of Truth, fear to contradict the facts of Principle, and so push his life outside Principle. Thus his very effort to avoid disobeying Principle will bring him in accord with Principle, and this itself constitutes the effort to obey the law of Principle, or keep the commandments of God.

The very first of these commandments is, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” that is, thou shalt admit the existence of no other substance than spiritual substance, and of no life but spiritual life. This knowledge of the truth about substance and Life is the salvation or safety which a man buys without money and without price, for the very simple reason that, as the writer of the fourth gospel says, Life eternal is a knowledge of God and the Christ, and this knowledge cannot possibly be bought with money, but has to be won by the perpetual effort of the individual to divorce all sensuality from his consciousness, and to reflect the Christ, Truth, which is his true self in every word and deed.

But the Christ is the reality of every man and woman in the material universe. Therefore the Christ is generic man. Generic man, however, is the full reflection of divine, Mind, is the reality of every phenomenon in the material universe. The reality not merely of those greater ideas, the sons and daughters of God, but of those lesser ideas or subdivisions of greater ideas and their identities, such as money, mountains, or mammals. The real man, consequently, knows all there is to know as to what money really is, and knowing this he knows he possesses all the spiritual substance belonging to him as a divine idea.

To the human being, governed by animal instincts, it is different. To him money represents the “sesame” which will open to him all the delights of the senses—all that he is apt to regard as happiness. One thing, and one alone, he will tell you, it will not purchase—health; but even so, he will add, it helps to mitigate the pains of ill health. Therefore he plunges madly into the race for wealth, lusting for money with all the energy that is in him. His philosophy is commonly that of Iago, “Put money in thy purse;”' or even of the Roman poet, “Make money, honestly if you can, but make money.” Yet the man who yields to this temptation, sells his manhood in the act, and in his heart he knows it. He is gambling against Principle, and his eventual spiritual bankruptcy is assured. Therefore, with keen discernment the apostle wrote, “The love of money is the root of all evil.”