20 Sermon Illustrations on Avarice

Had covetous men, as the fable goes of Briareus, each of them one hundred hands, they would all of them be employed in grasping and gathering, and hardly one of them in giving or laying out, but all in receiving, and none in restoring,—a thing in itself so monstrous, that nothing in nature besides is like it, except it be death and the grave, the only things I know which are always carrying off the spoils of the world, and never making restitution. For otherwise, all the parts of the universe, as they borrow of one another, so they will pay what they borrow, and that by so just and well balanced an equality, that their payments always keep pace with their receipts.

— J. Dryden

One of the nights when Mrs. Siddons first performed at Drury Lane, a Jew boy, in his eagerness to get the first row in the shilling gallery, fell over into the pit, and was dangerously hurt. The manager of the theatre ordered the lad to be conveyed to a lodging, where he was attended by their own physician; but, notwithstanding all their attention, he died, and was decently buried, at the expense of the theatre. The mother came to the play-house to thank the managers, and they gave her his clothes and five guineas, for which she returned a courtesy, but, with some hesitation, added that they had forgotten to return her the shilling which Abraham had paid for coming in!

"When I was a lad," says one, "an old gentleman took some trouble to teach me some little knowledge of the world. With this view I remember he once asked me when a man was rich enough? I replied, when he has a thousand pounds. He said, No.—Two thousand? No.—Ten thousand? No.—Twenty thousand? No.—A hundred thousand? which I thought would settle the business; but he still continuing to say No, I gave it up, and confessed I could not tell, but begged he would inform me. He gravely said, When he has a little more than he has, and that is never! If he acquires one thousand, he wishes to have two thousand; then five, then ten, then twenty, then fifty; from that his riches would amount to a hundred thousand, and so on till he had grasped the whole world; after which he would look about him, like Alexander, for other worlds to possess."

A man was taken into one of our insane asylums a few years ago from one of the Western cities. He had resolved to be rich. How he turned every stone to accumulate wealth! All his energy and every faculty were pushed toward that one end. “Wealth, wealth, wealth! money, money, money!” was his cry. At last it drove him mad, and they took him to the mad-house, where he threw himself into a rocking-chair, and cried:

“Millions of money, and in a mad-house!”

That was all there was of his life. Pretty short, wasn’t it? Sixty years gone, millions of money, and in a mad-house; and he died there. That was the summing up of his life.

When you can put out a fire by throwing oil on it, then, and not till then, can you extinguish avarice by feeding it with millions.

— N. D. HILLIS

B

BABIES, NAMING

In Japan a curious custom is in vogue with respect to the naming of babies. The new-born is taken to the temple, when it has attained the age of two weeks, and to the priest who receives him the father of the little one suggests three names deemed to be appropriate. The priest writes these three names on slips of paper. He holds these slips of paper for a few minutes, and then throws them over his shoulder, sending them as high in the air as possible. The slip that reaches the ground last contains the name that is conferred on the waiting baby.

The next step in the process is for the priest to copy the name on a piece of silk or fine paper, which is handed to the proud parent, with these words:

“So shall the child be named.”--_Harper’s Weekly._

The ancient fable of King Midas and his gift of turning everything he laid his hands upon into gold has been exactly reversed in these modern days. This good king was delighted with the gift the gods gave him until one day he turned his daughter into a golden image by a careless use of his power, and the counterfeit presentment was so utterly worthless compared with his child of flesh and blood that henceforth his charm was a horrible curse. Now it is our brightest and best which come under the spell of gold itself, and how it does harden and fossilize them! Our artists paint, our literary men write, our business men take hazardous and doubtful ventures, our young men and maidens marry, all for gold. How bright was the promise of Bret Harte until he began to command high prices for his stories? Howells, James and Stockton all delighted us, but presently we found ourselves wading through such stories as “April Hopes” and the “Hundredth Man.” As soon as one begins to preach good sermons in the pulpit he immediately attracts the attention of some rich congregation and becomes a high-priced man. Everywhere the test of excellence is price, and all the choicest spirits are sought out and put into the livery of our sovereign gold.--Providence _Journal_.

The large families in this country to-day are to be found only in the industrial centers. Greedy men have considered this their opportunity, and have located great stocking and silk factories in these places for the sake of employing the children of these families.

I saw in the ill-ventilated rooms of these silk-factories girls by the dozen under fourteen years of age. More than once I saw a stoop-shouldered, anemic girl, apparently not more than eleven years of age, standing all day before her machine so fatigued that she stood on one foot while she rested the other by holding it against the leg on which she was standing. To my inquiry as to her age the reply was, “The affidavit said she was fourteen.”

A girl in whose machine the silk by chance became tangled was approached by a foreman with the jaw of a bulldog and a face whose every feature indicated brutality, and who poured out a stream of profanity as he threatened to dismiss her if it occurred again. These girls were the daughters of coal-miners or of a coal-miner’s widow.

We are pretty generally agreed that society owes to every one equal treatment with his fellows in an effort to get a living and an equal protection in using the opportunities that exist. When one looks into the hollow cheeks and sunken eyes of veritable children to whom in so many cases the home was never the holy of holies, and where instead of the gentle voice and loving hearts of teachers there is the brutal taskmaster, one feels the need of some new Declaration of Independence.

A railroad that owns and operates mines in this region, last year, in addition to an already fat dividend on its stock, declared a stock dividend of fifty per cent. Would that it were possible to print on every share of that dividend a description of the existence that is called life in this section of our land! (Text.)--JESSE HILL, _Christian Endeavor World_.

A certain John Hopkins, familiarly known in his day for his rapacity as “Vulture Hopkins,” lived a worthless life but died possest of a million and a half dollars, left so as not to be inherited until after the second generation, so that, as he said, “his heirs would be as long spending it as he had been in getting it.” Pope preserved his memory in this couplet:

“When Hopkins dies a thousand lights attend The wretch who, living, saved a candle’s end.”

Such a life is properly to be condemned, altho its results may be useful to a subsequent generation.

"If you would abolish avarice, you must abolish its mother, luxury."

-- Cicero

"Avarice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey's end."

-- Cicero

"Avarice - generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition."

-- Samuel Johnson

"Avarice is the vice of declining years."

-- George Bancroft

"The avaricious man is like the barren sandy ground of the desert which sucks in all the rain and dew with greediness, but yields no fruitful herbs or plants for the benefit of others."

-- Zeno

"Avarice is always poor."

-- Samuel Johnson

"Poverty wants some things, luxury many, avarice all things."

-- Abraham Cowley

"Avarice increases with the increasing pile of gold."

-- Juvenal

"Few rich men own their own property. Their property owns them."

-- Robert Ingersoll, noted atheist