Who has occasioned more suffering, the youth who has sinned
against himself in wild folly and repented, or the man who has planned
his life with that cold craft and deliberate cruelty which sacrifices
everything to self-advantage? Can any human mind measure the various
and almost infinite wrongs committed by the man who piles up through
years of sordid avarice an unjust fortune? Who can count the broken
hearts in the pathway of that implacable ambition which "wades through
slaughter to a throne"? These things may not be apparent to the man
whose nature is subdued to the hue of that artificial society in which
he lives, a society which permits such crimes to pass unquestioned.
They are certainly not perceived by the criminals themselves. To-day,
as in the day of Christ, they "devour widows' houses, and for a
pretense make long prayers," save, perhaps, that more blind than the
ancient Pharisees, their prayers seem real, and they themselves are
unconscious of pretense. Now also, as then, they give their tithes in
conventional benevolence, forgetting, and hoping to make others forget,
the sources of their wealth in their use of it. How is it that such
men are so unconscious of offense? Simply because they have never
grasped Christ's deliberate statement that sins of temper are much
worse than sins of passion; that cruelty is a worse thing than folly;
that the wrong wrought by squandering the substance in a far country is
more quickly repaired, and more easily forgiven, than the wrong of
hoarding one's substance in the avarice which neglects the poor, or
adding to it by methods which trample the weak and humble in the dust,
as deserving neither pity nor attention.
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