There is a curious chapter on almsgiving, by Miss Yonge, in one of the late numbers of the “Monthly Packet”, (a good magazine, though, on the whole, and full of nice writing,) which announces to her disciples, that “at least the tenth of their income is God’s part.” Now, in the name of the Devil, and of Baal to back him,—are nine parts, then, of all we have—our own? or theirs? The tithe may, indeed, be set aside for some special purpose—for the maintenance of a priesthood—or as by the St. George’s Company, for distant labour, or any other purpose out of their own immediate range of action. But to the Charity or Alms of men—to Love, and to the God of Love, all their substance is due—and all their strength—and all their time. That is the first commandment: Thou shalt love the Lord with all thy strength and soul. Yea, says the false disciple—but not with all my money. And of these it is written, after that thirty-third verse of Luke xiv.: “Salt is good; but if the salt have lost his savour, it is neither fit for the land nor the dunghill. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” Now in Holbein’s great sermon against wealth, the engraving, in the Dance of Death, of the miser and beggar, he chose for his text the verse: “He that stoppeth his ears at the cry of the poor, he also shall cry himself, and shall not be heard.” And he shows that the ear is thus deafened by being filled with a murmuring of its own: and how the ear thus becomes only as a twisted shell, with the sound of the far-away ocean of Hell in it for ever, he teaches us, in the figure of the fiend which I engraved for you in the seventh of these letters, [29] abortive, fingerless, contemptible, mechanical, incapable;—blowing the winds of death out of its small machine: Behold, this is your God, you modern Israel, which has brought you up out of the land of Egypt in which your fathers toiled for bread with their not abortive hands; and set your feet in the large room, of Usury, and in the broad road to Death!