It needs no argument; it is self-evident. Democracy is born of equality in the social scale. Wealth controls men. It differentiates between the wealthy and the poor. It brings into one class the men and women of fortune, into another the sons and daughters of toil and poverty.
Wealth fosters extravagance on the part of the rich; in order to imitate the fashions of the wealthy, those in every other way equal become also extravagant, and ambitious to be wealthy. Ambition soon to be rich is responsible for the great gambling mania manifest everywhere, from the games of “pitch-penny,” “policy,” and “craps” to the huge dealings in the stock exchange pits of New York and Chicago.
The imperial power connected with this vast wealth passes computation. It controls parliaments, congresses, legislatures, municipal councils, and courts. The noted historian, the late John Clark Ridpath, thus expressed it in 1898:—
Not a nation in the world is exempt from the dominion of the Universal Monarchy. The political autonomy of every one has been surrendered, openly or covertly, to the will of a ruler whom none have seen, but before whom every state and principality, every republic, and kingdom, and empire, bends a supple knee.
More than twenty thousand millions of war debt resting upon the nations of the world! Twenty thousand millions of debt, and every dollar of it owned by the invisible Empire! The interest at four per cent. amounts to eight hundred millions of dollars a year. And it is intended that this principal and this interest account shall run forever. While civilization continues—as long as mankind shall be organized into nations—so long will this intolerable incubus rest day and night on the labor of the world. Under the horrid nightmare every workingman in every country under the sun becomes and remains a slave. It is needless to say that such a debt will absorb the entire property of the world. It will drink the ocean dry. It will suck up, at the rate of eight hundred millions a year, the whole wealth of mankind, and then demand another planet to satisfy the vacuum in its infernal maw.
But since this utterance, look at Spain; look at the expense of the war with China; look at England paying the price that staggers humanity, increasing debts, binding stronger the bands of slavery to the “Invisible Empire.”
The imperialism of capital has given birth to the imperialism of labor, offspring unwelcome. The young king in the labor ranks is training for power. When he can force the democratic workmen to submit to his imperial, dictatorial sway, with this army he will attack the money-king. As the editor of a great Eastern paper recently said: “A vast power ‘is this power of labor monopoly, and one that may ‘be as dangerous, more dangerous, than all the ‘monopolies of finance. . . . Great new problems ‘confront the people in this trust age. The greatest ‘of these is not the problem of financial control. It ‘is the problem presented by the possibilities of a ‘labor trust more dangerous and aggressive than any ‘other.’” But this is the fruit of the imperialism of wealth.
There is one question paramount to all these, the question of submission to the coming Ruler. For know this that “the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men.” Men may now acknowledge Him or not, as they will; He is testing them as to their right to rule with Him eternally. Those who acknowledge Him now, who bow to human imperialism in no form, who stand in the manhood of Jesus Christ, will with Him reign forever. Those who submit to this present world and its spirit will pass with it into oblivion. The great question of each and all is the right relation to the King of the Universe.
THE PICTURE OF A TRUE MAN.
By James Russell Lowell
He stood upon the world's broad threshold; wide
The din of battle and of slaughter rose;
He saw God stand upon the weaker side,
That sank in seeming loss before its foes;
Many there were who made great haste and sold
Unto the cunning enemy their swords:
He scorned their gifts of fame, and power, and gold,
And, underneath their soft and flowery words,
Heard the cold serpent hiss; therefore he went
And humbly joined him to the weaker part,
Fanatic named, and fool, yet well content
So he could be the nearer to God's heart,
And feel its solemn pulses sending blood
Through all the wide-spread veins of endless good.
—James Russell Lowell.
SOME SCRIPTURES FOR THE POOR AND RICH.
“Hear, and Your Soul Shall Live.”
“If there be among you a poor man of one of thy brethren within any of thy gates in thy land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not harden thine heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor brother; but thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him, and shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need, in that which he wanteth.” Deut. 15: 7, 8.
“For the poor shall never cease out of the land; therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.” Deut. 15: 11.
“For the needy shall not alway be forgotten; the expectation of the poor shall not perish forever.” Ps. 9: 18.
“For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, now will I arise, saith the Lord; I will set him in safety from him that puffeth at him.” Ps. 12: 5.
“He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand; but the hand of the diligent maketh rich.” Prov. 10: 4.
“The poor is hated even of his own neighbor; but the rich hath many friends.” Prov. 14: 20.
“He that despiseth his neighbor sinneth; but he that hath mercy on the poor, happy is he.” Prov. 14: 21.
“Better is little with the fear of the Lord than great treasure and trouble therewith.” Prov. 15: 16.
“Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues without right.” Prov. 16: 8.
“Slothfulness casteth into a deep sleep; and an idle soul shall suffer hunger.” Prov. 19: 15.
“Better is the poor that walketh in his uprightness, than he that is perverse in his ways, tho he be rich.” Prov. 28: 6.
“A poor man that oppresseth the poor is like a sweeping rain which leaveth no food.” Prov. 28: 3.
“He that tilleth his land shall have plenty of bread; but he that followeth after vain persons shall have poverty enough.” Prov. 28: 19.
“The Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of His people, and the princes thereof; for ye have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye beat My people to pieces, and grind the face of the poor? saith the Lord God of hosts.” Isa. 3: 14, 15.
“He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much; and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much.” Luke 16: 10.
“Hearken, my beloved brethren, Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which He hath promised to them that love Him?” James 2: 5.
THE NEXT WORLD-POWER.
By Henry Demarest Lloyd
[By Henry Demarest Lloyd, author of “Wealth against Commonwealth,” “Newest England,” etc., in New York Independent, May 16, 1901.]
WHEN the news reached Germany of the new steel trust in America, the stocks of the iron and steel mills listed on the Berlin Bourse fell, and they continue depressed. Some of these establishments are superior in their technic to some of the most important concerns in the American combination—in the saving of the by-products of coke-making, for instance. They are large enough and have capital enough to realize all the economies of “large-scale production.” They have a high tariff wall around their preserve. But the American concerns have many times more money than they have. Money is the sinews of war, and competition nowadays is not political economy, but war. The similar flutter among the British iron and steel men; the eagerness of British speculators in Capel Court to invest in the new steel stocks, altho they are shares in a worse than Jameson raid on the chief industry of their own country; the entrance of one of our most successful street railway entrepreneurs into the field of London transit, the announcement that the millionaires’ club who have been consolidating American railroads are now making their plans to consolidate the English railways, the fact that important American manufacturers are sapping and mining the tariff fortifications of their competitors by establishing works within France and Germany—all these point to one great piece of news—the coming capitalistic conquest of Europe by America. I meet journalists, statesmen, professors, who have been pitying America because so helpless in the grasp of its plutocracy, but who are now dismayed as it dawns on them that their own countries are the next victims. The American trusts are a European question as well as American. The monopolists who have conquered us are now going to conquer our European cousins. I discover no sign of any adequate power of resistance here in the governments or the business men. After careful inquiry I can not find that even the Socialist leaders of Germany are ready to advocate anything that would be “thorough.”
The capitalistic evolution of America, unimpeded by the distractions that have divided social and personal energy in Europe among many channels, and unhampered by tradition of Church, State, rank, noblesse oblige, richesse oblige, regard for the status quo, or personal ease, has bred not a new Cæsar, but a class of Cæsars. There is nowhere else, and never before has existed, such a set of men as the present rulers of American industry—nowhere men so strong, keen, unscrupulous, nowhere men with such a nose for dollars, nowhere men with so many dollars. Europe is too slow and too poor to withstand them. While it is talking, the Americans will be doing. The consolidation of the principal European industries with the American will be accomplished while the Europeans are still talking about what they would do if it should be attempted. The development of the trusts in America has been only the rehearsal; the real play is now about to begin on the stage of the world’s industry.
It is extremely interesting to note that the thought of Europe is running strongly toward international action in this emergency. A distinguished publicist of Switzerland, known also all over Europe as a literary man, laid before me a plan for such a movement. One of the leading professors of political economy here advocates the international regulation of prices as the public remedy, and co-operation as the private remedy. One of the intellectual leaders of the Belgian Socialists, who are the most advanced and practical Socialists in Europe, predicted to me that the middle class of continental Europe, where there still is a middle class, will prefer revolution to submitting to the business methods which they see destroying the middle class of America. A movement is being strongly pushed among the coal miners of Europe for an international regulation or control of the coal output by the miners of all countries; with the co-operation of the mine owners if they will join, without it if they will not. The Belgian and French miners are warm advocates of the plan; the German leaders at first opposed it, but have now taken it up and advocate it in their organ and at the meetings of the men. The Scottish Miners’ Federation has unanimously approved a provisional plan for it, which includes the eight-hour day, a living wage and an old-age pension. The nervous and impracticable talk about European alliances for tariff wars against the United States is another aspect of the general dovecote fright at the appearance here of the American industrial Alexander, sighing for more worlds to conquer, and more lucky than Alexander, destined to find them. Americans must wake up to the fact that they are being called upon to become international quite as inexorably by industrial forces as by their military policy.
Berlin, Germany.
GREED AND ITS HARVEST.
By John Clark Ridpath
[From “Harvest of Greed,” by the late John Clark Ridpath, in the Signs of the Times of Dec. 6, 1899.]
After the Revolution of 1776 we were not satisfied with liberty and independence. After the Civil War we were not content any longer to follow the primary industries and beautiful handicrafts by which our fathers became fellow-citizens and equals in a Commonwealth of Right. We made the fatal discovery that wealth can be accumulated more rapidly in the secondary and tertiary pursuits than in the noble pursuits of production. We found out that getting rich is difficult in the field and orchard, but expeditious in the streets. We adopted the principle that a sufficiency in this world is not enough. We proclaimed superfluity as the end and aim of life. We made it necessary that the sons of the desert should pluck ostriches in order that women may be respectable. We made it necessary that man should not have pleasure until he has ravaged the Kimberly diamond mines, and that he should not be “honorable” until he has bought an office. We made it necessary that society should learn the speech of an artificial life, should commit a code of inane platitudes, and convert hypocrisy into a fine art before a decent method of intercourse should be established. We poured oil on the fires of material ambitions, and disparaged the ambitions of the mind and heart. Not content with the existing crop of ergot, we scattered new germs of greed from the Penobscot to the Platte—and then sat down to await the harvest.
The seed of our social and national insanity has now germinated and grown to full stalk and efflorescence. The harvest is at hand. We have seen that the first Harvest of Greed was despotism—the domination of the few over the many—the renunciation of democracy. The second fruit of the harvest is the suppression, or the attempted suppression, of the intellectual life. Time was when the intellectual life was the glory of these our lands of freedom. Time was when the greatness of the mind was the greatness of the man. Time is when Greed, fearing the assagai of intellect, contrives to choke it into silence. Time is when the organic forces of society offer immense rewards for servility, and breathe out threatenings against all mental and spiritual insurrection. There has not been another time in the history of mankind when the organized agencies of civilization were turned so powerfully and so craftily against free thought, free speech, free literature, and free manhood.
The weeds of Greed are growing high. They are so high that man gropes in the jungle, and fears to speak, lest the echo of his voice shall arouse the enemy who never sleeps. Out of this attempted suppression comes paralysis. Only the strongest of the strong are able to stand up and defy the assailants of freedom. And yet freedom is the condition of intellectual excellence in all the world. The human genius flourishes only under conditions of free initiative and equality of rights. All the8 (472)great intellectual work has been done in epochs of emancipation and reform; it has never been done in the epoch of glory and retrogression.
This Is the Law of Life.
He who surfeits does not soar. The intellectual and spiritual age of man is the age when moderation reigns and when Greed has not yet been gratified. There never was yet in human history a time in which the present politics, economics, and social moods of the world were prevalent, when the human mind accomplished great works or dreamed of a glorious future.
The suppression of the intellectual life of men, of peoples, of races, comes swiftly in the wake of surfeit and glory. Art and literature flourish in the age of the primary industries; they languish in the age of commerce. Tyre and Sidon,—all the Phœnician States and the maritime States of Asia Minor,—perished without a book; for trade has no history. Egypt, when she became a maritime power, lost the history which she had made in the days of her independence. So also did Greece lose her splendid ascendancy when her commerce and conquest in the Alexandrian age took the place of the free and unique life of the great Hellenes. Socrates knew well enough how to plant fig orchards and how to gather the fruits; but if any one had proposed that he enter trade, he would have laughed an immortal guffaw, to be heard for centuries.
The age of Shakespeare was not the age of Disraeli. The one was the greatest genius of the world; the other was a jester, a literary mechanician. The age of Irving is not the age of Gould. The two men sleep in adjacent dust. The tomb of the latter is glorious; the tomb of the former is humble. The former was a prophet of humanity; the latter was the Genghis Khan of Greed.
Greed fills the granaries of the world with the threshed-out hopes and virtues of mankind. Greed has hedged the way of aspiration, and made the sincere truth of life read like a lie. In the lexicon of gain, truth and falsehood are the same word. In the Decalogue of Greed, the word not is nine times omitted, and in the fifth commandment the not is inserted. In the New Testament of Greed, the place of the Sermon on the Mount is marked only with a foot-note, which reads, “Omitted for business reasons.” By Greed, the Declaration of Independence and the Rights of Man have been placed on the Index Expurgatorius; and by Greed the Farewell Address and the Emancipation Proclamation are declared taboo.
By Greed the free, outdoor, industrious life of American people has been converted into a life of turmoil, beginning in competition and ending in fraud and faro. By Greed the great palaces of the avenue have been substituted for the humble homes of the people, and by Greed, the doors and windows of the palaces have been nailed up, while the occupants have gone off yachting to Norway and Venice. Within a single square mile of the New York City Hall, more than three hundred thousand human bodies are left to swelter, and three hundred thousand human souls are left to starve, through all the burning months of summer, while the cool sea washes but a few furlongs away, and the hills of Westchester are green, and the sky bends blue over the Tappan Zee and the Catskills.
Poverty, misery, filth, ignorance, degradation, depravity of life, and dishonor in death—such is the Harvest of Greed.
Greed has a prince for his son and heir, tramps for his grandchildren, and brigands and anarchists for his posterity.
If Shakespeare lived now, he would hardly write:—
“O what a world of vile, ill-favored faults
Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year!”
It takes the perfume of all the way from three thousand to three hundred thousand a year now. The old-time competence is now penury; the old-time wealth but respectable poverty.
He that is proud of riches is a fool. For if he be exalted above his neighbors because he hath more gold, how much inferior is he to a gold mine?—Jeremy Taylor.
HUNGER AND COLD.
By James Russell Lowell
[By the late Hon. James Russell Lowell.]
Sisters two, all praise to you,
With your faces pinched and blue;
To the poor man you've been true
From of old:
You can speak the keenest word,
You are sure of being heard,
From the point you're never stirred,
Hunger and Cold!
Let sleek statesmen temporize;
Palsied are their shifts and lies
When they meet your bloodshot eyes,
Grim and bold;
Policy you set at naught,
In their traps you'll not be caught,
You're too honest to be bought,
Hunger and Cold!
Bolt and bar the palace door;
While the mass of men are poor,
Naked truth grows more and more
Uncontrolled;
You had never yet, I guess,
Any praise for bashfulness;
You can visit sans court-dress,
Hunger and Cold!
While the music fell and rose,
And the dance reeled to its close,
Where her round of costly woes
Fashion strolled,
I beheld with shuddering fear
Wolves' eyes through the windows peer;
Little dream they you are near,
Hunger and Cold!
When the toiler's heart you clutch,
Conscience is not valued much,
He recks not a bloody smutch
On his gold:
Everything to you defers,
You are potent reasoners,
At your whisper Treason stirs,
Hunger and Cold
Rude comparisons you draw,
Words refuse to sate your maw,
Your gaunt limbs the cobweb law
Can not hold:
You're not clogged with foolish pride,
But can seize a right denied;
Somehow God is on your side,
Hunger and Cold!
You respect no hoary wrong
More for having triumphed long;
Its past victims, haggard throng,
From the mould
You unbury: swords and spears
Weaker are than poor men's tears,
Weaker than your silent years,
Hunger and Cold!
Let them guard both hall and bower;
Through the window you will glower,
Patient till your reckoning hour
Shall be tolled:
Cheeks are pale, but hands are red,
Guiltless blood may chance be shed,
But ye must and will be fed,
Hunger and Cold!
God has plans man must not spoil,
Some were made to starve and toil,
Some to share the wine and oil,
We are told:
Devil's theories are these,
Stifling hope and love and peace,
Framed your hideous lusts to please,
Hunger and Cold!
Scatter ashes on thy head,
Tears of burning sorrow shed,
Earth! and be by Pity led
To Love's fold;
Ere they block the very door
With lean corpses of the poor,
And will hush for naught but gore,—
Hunger and Cold!
WHAT WAR HAS COST THE WORLD.
By S.
WHAT the world has paid in blood and money for its own devastation and the multiplication of its own sorrows will never be known by mortal man. I speak of the world as a whole; for, the peoples have struggled against peoples, nations against nations, humanity is still a unit, and its sensitiveness to pleasure and suffering alike acute in all portions of the earth. So wherever war has raged, it is the old story of humanity heaping sorrow, misery, and death upon itself. The nations that have sowed the seeds of war have garnered to themselves the bosom of destruction; and nations that have been trampled under foot have turned upon their tormentors, or hurled themselves upon other peoples, to supplant, uproot, harass, and destroy. Thus has the earth wasted itself and slain its own household from the days of Cain and Nimrod and Nero down to the days in which we live.
From the earliest times, families, tribes, and nations have wandered from place to place, dispossessing neighboring families, and tribes, and nations, and leaving in the wake of their wicked pilgrimage fire, famine, pestilence, ruined homes, crippled inmates, desolation, and death. We see it in the buffetings of the Hittites from Egypt on the south, from Assyria and Babylon on the east, and from the tribes of Asia Minor on the north, until the nation was ground to powder and scattered to the winds, saved from oblivion only by the records of Holy Writ and the writings in the rocks. Only for these, we could not know that such a nation was ever on the earth.
In the history of the Cymry, or Welsh, we have another example of an aggressive nation that has been ground between the upper and nether millstones of war. The Welsh are the lineal descendants of a race which drove a bloody plow through the people of the ancient world from the land of Shinar to the British Isles. But from the successive shocks of the Normans, the Romans, and the Saxons they have recoiled into the mountains and valleys of Wales. For four hundred years they fought the Romans; for six hundred years they fought the Saxons—one thousand years of desperate fighting for independence, till the death of Llewellyn, the last of their princes. Now they are crowded back into the confines of Wales, mourning the loss of their independence, the destruction of their literature, and the massacre of their poets. Of the sorrows they spread in the wake of their progress from the Tigris to the Thames, only heaven has the record; of the desolation wrought and the lives that went out along the path of that human hurricane, only heaven can tell; and to quell the spirit of conquest in them cost the treasure and blood of Rome, and the lives of many a Saxon horde.
But these are not the only migrations in armor from which the world has suffered. Wherever men have lived, the doctrine of Cain has found its votaries, and the shrine of the war-god has drunk the blood of its sacrifices. When men began to lord it over men, and the demands of the State became more sacred than the individual rights of man, then it was that the human thought himself exempt from the laws of God, and free to murder and plunder and ravish in the name of the king or State that sent him out; and under this reasoning the ambition of a petty lord was sufficient license for the commission of almost every crime. Self was enthroned in the place of God, and licensed men to do that which the King of kings has forbidden for all time. “Thou shalt not steal,” and “Thou shalt not kill,” stand reversed to-day by the War Department of every nation under heaven—stand reversed to-day in the heart of every human being who takes up the implements of death to bruise, and mangle, and kill, or who applauds the awful havoc of the battle-field. Satan is still fighting the laws and authority of God; and Thor and Mars are the field marshals of his campaign. The hold which they have secured upon the sentiments of the people, indicates the extent to which the world will devastate itself for the sake of the glitter and glamour and “glory” of murderous combat. It is this that has opened the way for what war has cost the world.
We will pass by the predatory pilgrimage of ancient peoples, and the ruin they have wrought, and draw aside the curtain of time and distance to look hastily upon what later peoples have paid for their worship of licensed passion and lustful power.
Babylon, lording it over the world, subjugating9peoples and transplanting nations, worshiping war and sacrificing nations upon its altar, spreading death and suffering from India to the Great Sea, dozes at last in luxury, and passes into history conquered at the hands of a vassal power. War cost Babylon the full price of her existence.
Out of the mists of tradition emerges the Medo-Persian empire, welded in blood, and carrying conquest from Babylon, Nineveh, and the Indus, to the Danube, the Dnieper, and the Nile. History has given us little record of the period when Medo-Persia was at peace. When not engaged in actual war, she was preparing to avenge herself upon her enemies. Conquest was her business, and she stuck to it with a zeal. Conquest was her god, and her life, too, went out in its worship. These nations that worshiped war at such a cost in human lives have paid the penalty with their own. The cost was dear; but they paid it, and stepped down.
The burial of Persia is synchronous with the rise of Grecia, and due to it. Her disintegration was made possible by the indulgence of her people in the luxury that followed her conquests of other nations. Greece followed in the footsteps of Persia, and Rome followed in the footsteps of Grecia, and each paid the same penalty for the worship of Mars. Truly, woeful spectacles are the fearful slaughters and the streams of blood that have been poured out by men for the mastery over men and the exaltation of self. There is not a country in all the world but that has had the hearts of its people wrung by the horrors of war; not a country where the fires of the war-god have not been lighted, and the incense of his votaries gone up from the mouths of cannon or the smoke of burning homes; not a country to-day that would make an outcast of the man who murders in war. This is what war has done for the world, what it has cost the world; but what of the cruelties suffered by humanity while the dreadful work went on?
In the battles of ancient peoples, massacre followed victory as sure as victory was won. This is what swells the casualty list of Platæa to 257,000 men; of Issus to 100,000; of Magnesia to 53,000; of Canae to 46,000; of Metaurus to 43,000; of Arbela to 90,000. But when the battle had been won and the massacre was ended, cruelty was not yet satisfied. Scipio Æmilius cut off the hands of such of his captives as he suffered to live, and we are told that this was a common Roman practise. Crassus hanged on crosses erected on the road from Rome to Capua 6,000 gladiators. Cæsar cut off the hands of thousands of his Gallic prisoners to intimidate their countrymen. He slew by treachery, in one day, one whole tribe of 430,000 men, women, and children; and the sum of Cæsar’s massacres in Gaul runs into the millions. “When Scipio believed that ‘there had entered enough soldiers into Carthagena, ‘he sent the most part against the inhabitants, as ‘the Romans are accustomed to do when they capture a town by assault, with order to kill all they met, to give no quarter, and thus to inspire terror of the Roman name.’—Polybius. (How much this reads like the order of a ruler recently when sending his troops to China.) Ancient victors are pictured in the act of flaying alive the vanquished who fell into their hands, boring their tongues, or burning out their eyes with hot irons. O war, what cruelties have been practised in thy service!
In the European wars covering a period of ninety years, ending in 1880, 4,470,000 lives were lost, and the actual amount of money expended in war during that time was $14,828,890,000. France and England between 1793 and 1815 spent $6,087,500,000 in their war, and lost 1,900,000 men. Russia and Turkey, in 1828, from their combined forces lost in war, 120,000; Spain and Portugal, from 1830-1840, 160,000; France and Algeria, 1830-1847, 110,000; England, France, and Russia, 1854-1860, 485,000; United States (Civil War) 1861-1865, 656,000; Brazil and Paraguay, 1864-1870, 330,000. In less than 300 years Great Britain alone has spent $6,618,330,000 in war. In 218 years France alone has spent $4,835,910,000 for the same purpose.
Thus we may gather by these few glimpses at what humanity has suffered, some little idea of what war has cost the world; but the story is not told. Preparation for war is costing the world more now, in money, than actual war did not many years ago; and the world that has worshiped war will come to its end in war, as have so many of the nations of the world. Then, and then only, will be written the record of the cost. That war will be the climax to which all wars have tended, the grand finale of the worship of Mars.
S.
War is hell.—William Tecumseh Sherman.
But war’s a game which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at. —Cowper.
SOME SCRIPTURES FOR THE RICH AND POOR.
“The words that I speak unto you, they are Spirit, and they are life.”
“But thou shalt remember the Lord thy God; for it is He that giveth thee power to get wealth.” Deut. 8:18.
“Both riches and honor come of Thee, and Thou reignest over all; and in Thine hand is power and might; and in Thine hand it is to make great, and to give strength unto all.” 1 Chron. 29:12.
“Blessed is he that considereth the poor; the Lord will deliver him in time of trouble. The Lord will preserve him, and keep him alive; and he shall be blessed upon the earth; and Thou wilt not deliver him unto the will of his enemies. The Lord will strengthen him upon the bed of languishing; Thou wilt make all his bed in his sickness.” Ps. 41:1–3.
“The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich, and He addeth no sorrow with it.” Prov. 10:22.
“Riches profit not in the day of wrath; but righteousness delivereth from death.” Prov. 11:4.
“He that trusteth in his riches shall fall; but the righteous shall flourish as a branch.” Prov. 11:28.
“He that oppresseth the poor reproacheth his Maker; but he that honoreth Him hath mercy on the poor.” Prov. 14:31.
“Thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches: but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth Me, that I am the Lord which exercise loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth; for in these things I delight, saith the Lord.” Jer. 9:23, 24.
“Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the Lord’s wrath; but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of His jealousy; for He shall make even a speedy riddance of all them that dwell in the land.” Zeph. 1:18.
“Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, saying, Execute true judgment, and show mercy and compassion every man to his brother; and oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor; and let none of you imagine evil against his brother in your heart.” Zech. 7:9, 10.
“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal; for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Matt. 6:19–21.
“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” Matt. 16:26.
“Then Jesus, beholding him, loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest; go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, take up the cross, and follow Me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved; for he had great possessions.” Mark 10:21, 22.
“For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good; but Me ye have not always.” Mark 14:7.
“And He said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness; for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.” Luke 12:15.
“And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee; then whose shall those things be which thou hast provided? So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.” Luke 12:19–21.
“For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil; which some reaching after have been led astray from the faith, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” 1 Tim. 6:10, R.V.
“Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not high-minded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy; that they do good, that they be rich in good works, ready to distribute, willing to communicate; laying up in store for themselves a good foundation against the time to come, that they may lay hold on eternal life.” 1 Tim. 6:17–19.
“But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?” 1 John 3:17.
