_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. vi. 19, 20,
21.
To understand the words of our Lord is the business of life. For it is
the main road to the understanding of The Word himself. And to receive
him is to receive the Father, and so to have Life in ourselves. And
Life, the higher, the deeper, the simpler, the original, is the
business of life.
The Word is that by which we live, namely, Jesus himself; and his words
represent, in part, in shadow, in suggestion, himself. Any utterance
worthy of being called _a truth_, is human food: how much more _The
Word_, presenting no abstract laws of our being, but the vital relation
of soul and body, heart and will, strength and rejoicing, beauty and
light, to Him who first gave birth to them all! The Son came forth to
_be_, before our eyes and in our hearts, that which he had made us for,
that we might behold _the truth_ in him, and cry out for the living
God, who, in the highest sense of all is The Truth, not as understood,
but as understanding, living, and being, doing and creating the truth.
"I am the truth," said our Lord; and by those who are in some measure
like him in being the truth, the Word can be understood. Let us try to
understand him.
Sometimes, no doubt, the Saviour would have spoken after a different
_fashion_ of speech, if he had come to Englishmen, instead of to Jews.
But the lessons he gave would have been the same; for even when
questioned about a matter for its passing import, his reply contained
the enunciation of the great human principle which lay in it, and
_that_ lies changeless in every variation of changeful circumstance.
With the light of added ages of Christian experience, it ought to be
easier for us to understand his words than it was for those who heard
him.
What, I ask now, is here the power of his word _For: For where your
treasure is, there will your heart be also_? The meaning of the reason
thus added is not obvious upon its surface. It has to be sought for
because of its depth at once and its simplicity. But it is so complete,
so imaginatively comprehensive, so immediately operative on the
conscience through its poetic suggestiveness, that when it is once
understood, there is nothing more to be said, but everything to be
done.
"Why not lay up for ourselves treasures upon earth?"
"Because there the moth and rust and the thief come."
"And so we should lose those treasures!"
"Yes; by the moth and the rust and the thief."
"Does the Lord then mean that the _reason_ for not laying up such
treasures is their transitory and corruptible nature?"
"No. He adds a _For_: 'For where your treasure is, there will your
heart be also.'"
"Of course the heart will be where the treasure is; but what has that
to do with the argument?"
This: that what is with the treasure must fare as the treasure; that
the heart which haunts the treasure-house where the moth and rust
corrupt, will be exposed to the same ravages as the treasure, will
itself be rusted and moth-eaten.
Many a man, many a woman, fair and flourishing to see, is going about
with a rusty moth-eaten heart within that form of strength or beauty.
"But this is only a figure."
True. But is the reality intended, less or more than the figure? Does
not _the rust and the moth_ mean more than disease? And does not _the
heart_ mean more than the heart? Does it not mean a deeper heart, the
heart of your own self, not of your body? of the _self_ that suffers,
not pain, but misery? of the self whose end is not comfort, or
enjoyment, but blessedness, yea, ecstasy? a heart which is the inmost
chamber wherein springs the divine fountain of your being? a heart
which God regards, though you may never have known its existence, not
even when its writhings under the gnawing of the moth and the slow fire
of the rust have communicated a dull pain to that outer heart which
sends the blood to its appointed course through your body? If God sees
that heart corroded with the rust of cares, riddled into caverns and
films by the worms of ambition and greed, then your heart is as God
sees it, for God sees things as they are. And one day you will be
compelled to see, nay, to _feel_ your heart as God sees it; and to know
that the cankered thing which you have within you, a prey to the vilest
of diseases, is indeed the centre of your being, your very heart.
Nor does the lesson apply to those only who worship Mammon, who give
their lives, their best energies to the accumulation of wealth: it
applies to those equally who in any way worship the transitory; who
seek the praise of men more than the praise of God; who would make a
show in the world by wealth, by taste, by intellect, by power, by art,
by genius of any kind, and so would gather golden opinions to be
treasured in a storehouse of earth.
Nor to such only, but surely to those as well whose pleasures are of a
more evidently transitory nature still, such as the pleasures of the
senses in every direction--whether lawfully or unlawfully indulged, if
the joy of being is centred in them--do these words bear terrible
warning. For the hurt lies not in this--that these pleasures are false
like the deceptions of magic, for such they are not: pleasures they
are; nor yet in this--that they pass away, and leave a fierce
disappointment behind: that is only so much the better; but the hurt
lies in this--that the immortal, the infinite, created in the image of
the everlasting God, is housed with the fading and the corrupting, and
clings to them as its good--clings to them till it is infected and
interpenetrated with their proper diseases, which assume in it a form
more terrible in proportion to the superiority of its kind, that which
is mere decay in the one becoming moral vileness in the other, that
which fits the one for the dunghill casting the other into the outer
darkness; creeps, that it may share with them, into a burrow in the
earth, where its budded wings wither and damp and drop away from its
shoulders, instead of haunting the open plains and the high-uplifted
table-lands, spreading abroad its young pinions to the sun and the air,
and strengthening them in further and further flights, till at last
they should become strong to bear the God-born into the presence of its
Father in Heaven. Therein lies the hurt.
He whose heart is sound because it haunts the treasure-house of heaven
may _be tempted of the devil_, but will be first _led up of the Spirit
into the wilderness_.