Now the moment that the Mammon devil gets his bellows put in men’s ears,—however innocent they may be, however free from actual stain of avarice, they become literally deaf to the teaching of true and noble men. My correspondent imagines himself to have read Shakespeare and Goethe;—he cannot understand a sentence of them, or he would have known the meaning of the Merchant of Venice, [30] and of the vision of Plutus, and speech of Mephistopheles on the Emperor’s paper-money [31] in the second part of Faust, and of the continual under-current of similar teaching in it, from its opening in the mountain sunrise, presently commented on by the Astrologer, under the prompting of Mephistopheles,—“the Sun itself is pure Gold,”—to the ditch-and-grave-digging scene of its close. He cannot read Xenophon, nor Lucian,—nor Plato, nor Horace, nor Pope,—nor Homer, nor Chaucer—nor Moses, nor David. All these are mere voices of the Night to him; the bought bellows-blower of the “Times” is the only piper who is in tune to his ear. And the woe of it is that all the curse comes on him merely as one of the unhappy modern mob, infected by the rest; for he is himself thoroughly honest, simple-hearted, and upright: only mischance made him take up literature as a means of life; and so brought him necessarily into all the elements of modern insolent thought: and now, though David and Solomon, Noah, Daniel, and Job, altogether say one thing, and the correspondent of the “Times” another, it is David, Solomon, and Daniel who are Narrs to him. Now the Parables of the New Testament are so constructed that to men in this insolent temper, they are necessarily misleading. It is very awful that it should be so; but that is the fact. Why prayer should be taught by the story of the unjust judge; use of present opportunity by that of the unjust steward; and use of the gifts of God by that of the hard man who reaped where he had not sown,—there is no human creature wise enough to know;—but there are the traps set; and every slack judge, cheating servant, and gnawing usurer may, if he will, approve himself in these. “Thou knewest that I was a hard man.” Yes—and if God were also a hard God, and reaped where He had not sown—the conclusion would be true that earthly usury was right. But which of God’s gifts to us are not His own? The meaning of the parable, heard with ears unbesotted, is this:—“You, among hard and unjust men, yet suffer their claim to the return of what they never gave; you suffer them to reap, where they have not strawed.—But to me, the Just Lord of your life—whose is the breath in your nostrils, whose the fire in your blood, who gave you light and thought, and the fruit of earth and the dew of heaven,—to me, of all this gift, will you return no fruit but only the dust of your bodies, and the wreck of your souls?”