THE WORSHIP OF WEALTH.

Southern Cross, Volume 3, Issue 3, 20 April 1895, Page 3

THE WORSHIP OF WEALTH.

This golden image, high by measureless cubits, set up where your green fields of England are furnaceburnt into the liketiess of the plain of Dura ; this idol, forbidden to us, first of all idols ; by our own Master and faith ; forbidden to us also by every human lip that has ever, in any age of people, been accounted of as able to speak according to the purposes of God. Continue to make that forbidden duty your principal one, and soon no more art, no more science, no more pleasure, will be possible. Catastrophe will come, or, worse than catastrophe, slow mouldering and withering into Hades. But if you can fix some conception of a true human state of life, to be striven for —life for all men, as for yourselves —if you can determine some honest and simple order of existence, following those trodden ways of wisdom which are pleasantness, and seeking her quiet and withdrawn paths, which, are peace—then, and so sanctifying wealth into the 4 commonwealth,’ all your art, your literature, your daily labours, your domestic affection and citizen’s duty* will join and increase;

into one magnificent harruony. ATou will kupw: then how to build welj enough ; you will build with;,stone well, but with flesh better, temples not made with hands, but riyetted with hearts, and that kind of marble, crimson - veined, is indeed eternal. > ; r r :> ;> y y --RusKIN.