1113. It strikes me, from the considerations presented under the head of Mundane Wealth, that the precepts of Christ were fundamentally erroneous, so far as they discredit and discourage efforts for the honest acquisition of wealth. (908.) 1114. God has given the fowls of the air feathers as a natural clothing, and thus any effort to procure clothing on their part is rendered unnecessary; he has not given them hands nor intellectual ingenuity to _spin_ and _weave_. On the other side, with little exception, man is naturally devoid of clothing, and requires clothes to protect him from the scorching solar rays or freezing blasts of winter, but _has_ been furnished with the _hands_ and the _ingenuity_ to _spin_ and _weave_. Under these circumstances, was it reasonable to allege that man should be governed by the example of the feathered creation? Was it reasonable to infer that there should be no spinning or weaving by men, because there neither was nor could be any performed by fowls? 1115. Again, the lily, like all other vegetables, not only comes into existence naked, but remains so, since it neither can nor will clothe itself, and would perish if by any artificial clothing it were shut out from the influence of the solar rays, and from the absorption of carbonic acid, which furnishes the vegetable creation with the carbon requisite for the fibres essential to stability. Hence the allegation that Solomon in all his glory was not _clothed_ like the lily, is irreconcilable with the nature and actual state of this beautiful flower, which is destitute of clothing by nature, and which would perish if it were clothed. The skin of vegetable leaves, to a certain extent, performs for them what mouths do for animals. How unreasonable, then, to argue from one to the other, that man should imitate the vegetable; or to compare a plant, naturally and of necessity naked, with a king gorgeously clothed?