“There are noble Christian workers,
      The men of faith and power,
    The overcoming wrestlers
      Of many a midnight hour;
    Prevailing princes with their God,
      Who will not be denied,
    Who bring down showers of blessing
      To swell the rising tide. 
    The Prince of Darkness quaileth
      At their triumphant way,
    Their fervent prayer availeth
      To sap his subtle sway.

    “And evermore the Father
      Sends radiantly down
    All-marvellous responses,
      His ministers to crown;
    The incense cloud returning
      As golden blessing-showers,
    We in each drop discerning
      Some feeble prayer of ours,
    Transmuted into wealth unpriced,
      By Him who giveth thus
    The glory all to Jesus Christ,
      The gladness all to us!"[29]

Money

  Limitations. 
  The Best Partnership. 
  Jesus’ Teaching. 
  Be Your Own Executor. 
  Missing the Master’s Meaning. 
  Money Talks. 
  Debts. 
  Rusty Money. 
  Are We True to Our Friend’s Trust?

Money

Limitations.

Money seems almost almighty in its power to do things, and make changes.  It can make a desert blossom as a rose.  It can even defy death.  Medical skill holds the life here that otherwise would have been snuffed out.  Great buildings go up.  Colleges begin their life with apparatus and books, skilled instructors, and eager students.  Mammoth enterprises spring into being.  Hospitals and churches rise up with skilled attendants and talented preachers.

We have come, in our day, and perhaps peculiarly in our country, to think that there is no limit to the power of money.  Our ideas of its value are really greatly exaggerated.  That first sentence I used would be revised by many to read, “Money is almighty.”  The cautious words “seems” and “almost” would be promptly cut out.

Yet money has great limitations.  It will help greatly to remember what they are.  And many of us need the brain-clearing of that help.  Of itself money is utterly useless, so much dead-weight stuff lying useless and helpless.  It must have human hands to make it valuable.  It gets its value from our conception of its value and from our use of it.  It must have a human partner to be of any service at all.

In bad hands it becomes devilish in its badness.  And I needn’t put an “almost” in that sentence.  It may be as a very demon, or as the arch-devil himself, as really as it may seem to be divine in its creative and changing power.

Then it is valuable only in this world, on the earth.  At the line of death its value wholly ceases.  Over that line it takes its place as a pauper.  It is represented as being used for cobble stones in the streets of the new Jerusalem.  Yet it would need to go through some hardening process to make it of any account at all as paving material.