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Updated: June 5, 2025
Again, the Scriptures are pretty strong against Mammon-worship, but they do not recommend this original and peculiar cure. Nay, once more: what sad errors must have crept into the text of the prophet Isaiah when he is made to desire that our swords shall be converted into ploughshares, and our spears into pruning-hooks! But we have this solid consolation after all, that Mr.
We are infested with a philanthropy which is the offspring of our mammon-worship. But surely our tender mercies are cruel. We don't like to hang people, however unfit they may be to live amongst their fellows. A weakling pity will petition for the life of the worst murderer but for what?
For now the die was cast, and a soul that could have been pastorally satisfied with a lot of the humble type indicated, had been caught in a whirl, or entangled in a mesh, or involved in a complication whichever you like of Extravagance, or Worldliness, or Society, or Mammon-worship, or Plutocracy, or Pactolus or all the lot and there was an end of the matter!
And this is the arch-cynic and misanthrope, grinning at all that is loveable and tender! It is too often forgotten that Vanity Fair is not intended to be simply the world: it is society, it is fashion, the market where mammon-worship, folly, and dissipation display and barter their wares. Thackeray wrote many other books, and has given us many worthy characters.
No one set a more incisive brand on the meanness that often marks the unrestrained competition of great cities; no one was more effective in his insistence that the mere accumulation of wealth may mean the ruin of true prosperity; no one has assailed with such force the mammon-worship and the frivolity of his age.
'Leave those questions till I am tried. But is there no bitterness in the tone of that response? Does it not mean, 'It will be a long time before I have a chance of trying THAT? But I am not driven to such questions for the chance of convicting some of you of Mammon-worship. Let us look to the text. Read it again. "Why are you to take no thought? Because you cannot serve God and Mammon.
And though we would avoid the error of praising our own epoch as though it alone were humane, as though we only, "the latest seed of Time, have loved the people well," and shown our love by deeds; though we would not deny that to-day has its crying abuses as well as yesterday; yet it is hardly possible to survey the broad course of our history during the past sixty years, and not to perceive, amid all the cross-currents false ambitions, false pretences, mammon-worship, pitiless selfishness, sins of individuals, sins of society, sins of the nation an ever-widening and mastering stream of beneficent energy, which has already wonderfully changed for the better many of the conditions of existence, and which, since its flow shows no signs of abating, we may hope to see spreading more widely, and bearing down in its great flood the wrecks of many another oppression and iniquity.
I look upon earth as a place where every man is set to struggle and to work, that he may be made humble and pure-hearted, and fit for that better land for which earth is a preparation to which earth is the gate . . . If men would but consider how little of real evil there is in all the ills of which they are so much afraid poverty included there would be more virtue and happiness, and less world and Mammon-worship on earth than is.
Truly, he has quite enough to make him sad; but this is an unhealthy sadness: the mists of mammon-worship, rising up, meet in the mid æther of his mind, these lowering clouds of discontent: and the seeming calamity, that should be but a trial to his faith, looks too likely to wreck it.
I have not a very strong faith in the soundness of the commercial evangel upon this subject; still, the very last task I should set myself would be a sermon denunciative of mammon-worship mammon-love mammon-influence and so on; and this for two quite sufficient reasons one, that I have myself, I blushingly confess, a very strong partiality for notes of the governor and company of the Bank of England and sovereigns of full weight and fineness; the other, that the very best and fiercest discourse I ever heard fulminated against the debasing love of gold, especially characteristic, it is said, of these degenerate days, was delivered by a gentleman who, having lived some seventy useful and eloquent years at the rate of about three hundred a year or thereabout, was found to have died worth upwards of L.60,000, all secured by mortgages bearing 7 per cent interest on the Brazilian slave-estates of a relative by marriage.
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