Article November 1, 2013

The lust of money

Frederick Dixon

Originally published in the June 29, 1918 issue of The Christian Science Monitor

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.

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