CHRIST JESUS' pronouncement, "Ye have the poor always with you," has sometimes occasioned confusion of thought on the part of Bible students, the inferred pessimism being so at variance with the hopefulness of the gospel of good tidings. There is needed, however, a sense of order to comprehend the relative value of wealth and the wider significance of poverty in their relation to eternal life. From the metaphysical standpoint the possessor of vast material riches may be the poorest of the poor, as Dives began to realize in his mental transition from ease to dis-ease, from pride to lowliness. The man who gains millions in a financial gamble shuts the door toward true riches in his own face, for the lust after gold is the most corrosive and merciless of all mortal sicknesses. That Croesus is indeed a beggar whose millions cannot command health or happiness.
In passing frequently through a large industrial suburb the writer has noted the yardless, unattractive terraces in which the workers and their families live in order to be near their work: yet in the fashionable suburbs the employers" magnificent empty mansions cry aloud in their poverty, one of the many warnings still unheeded by the brothers of Dives —as by himself. That man is but a pauper who knows enough to gain wealth, place, and power and yet lacks the spiritual comprehension as to the true source of wealth ; and those who delight in building larger barns have yet to learn, as some one has well said, that "money can purchase every thing but happiness open every door but heaven's."
The many who so readily condemn the rich simply because they are rich, fail to comprehend that it is so the love of money which is "the root of all evil ;" and here again is needed a right sense of values, for surely God would not have endowed Solomon with great riches were they inherently evil. Both wealth and poverty are tests of individual character, and Solomon, whose wisdom and wealth were the wonder of the nations, awoke to the true appreciation of riches only when he realized that every material possession is "vanity and vexation of spirit."
