I will tell you of some other people who tempt God. They are those who remain quietly in mortal sin, day after day, week after week, month after month. They say to themselves: "God is good; he will give me time to repent." God may well say to such a one: "Thou fool, who has told thee that? This very night I will require thy soul of thee." He has a right to do it; and you have no right to expect another day of him. When you do so you are trying his patience; you are making an experiment on his mercy. This present moment is all you have a right to depend on. And yet you will sleep night after night in sin, forgetting that, if God should treat you justly, the morning would find you dead; forgetting that your whole life is nothing but a long temptation of God. ------------------- Sermon XLII. _Man liveth not by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God._ --St. Matthew iv. 4. One of the greatest, if not _the_ greatest, of the defects of the present time is an inordinate care for temporal and material things. {155} How shall we live? what shall we eat? wherewithal shall we be clothed?--these are the questions which men are all too much exercised about at the present day. We see persons who rise, and cause their children to rise, at a very early hour, and from that time till late at night they are working and toiling. We see men of the world who really injure their health, and perhaps shorten their days, by their close and unflagging attention to business. Why do people act thus? All for the sake of the bread that perisheth, all in order to heap up a few dollars which at best they can keep but for a few years. So great has this thirst for money-making become that we see it even in our young boys. They don't want to stay at school; they don't want to store up learning; by the time they are fourteen or a little older (having nothing in their heads but reading, writing, and a little confused arithmetic) they want to be off to the store, the workshop, or the factory. Why? Because they want to join as soon as possible in the wild-goose chase after the goods of the world. Now, all these classes of persons have to learn "that man liveth not by bread alone." My dear friends, besides that poor body which you work so hard to feed, to clothe, and to please, you have an immortal soul. Body and soul united form what we call man. So, then, you must not act as if you were all body. You cannot do so without peril to your soul. Suppose you were to try an experiment of this kind. You say to yourself: "I will eat nothing; I will have prayers for breakfast, confession for lunch, prayers and devotions for dinner, and meditation on death for supper." Then you try it for a week. {156} What an elegant skeleton you would make for a museum at the end of that time! Yet people treat their souls just in that way. Instead of refreshing it with prayers and devotions, etc., they