Money

Translated into its equivalent, money just means food and clothing and a salubrious dwelling. It means instructive books and rational recreation. It means freedom from anxiety and leisure for personal improvement. It means the education of one's children and the power of doing good to others. And to inveigh against it, as if it were intrinsically sinful, is as fanatical as it would be to inveigh against the bread and the raiment, the books and the Bibles which the money procures. It would be to stultify all those precepts which tell us to provide things honest in the sight of all men; to do good and to communicate; to help forward destitute saints after a godly sort; to make friends of the unrighteous mammon. And as there is nothing in the Bible to prohibit the acquirement of wealth, there is much to guide us in its right bestowment. Using but not abusing God's bounties, the Christian avoids both the wasteful and the penurious extremes, and is neither a miser nor a spendthrift.