Surely, for the whole of that part of your life you are under a strict obligation to render service in return--equal to that which you claim. And if you, by your service, cannot insure to others an equality of possession in things material (and make as good and wholesome a use of them as they could make), those material possessions should be a weight upon your conscience, till you have got matters more fairly adjusted. Take it as your standard of life to consume no more than you, by your own labour, in your own lifetime, could produce. What right has any man to more than that, except through the bounty and kindness of his fellows? But if he insists on more, and takes more, does he really possess it? Only in an ever diminishing degree in proportion to his excess, because as he exceeds he is ever diminishing his true faculty for reception. Here is a simple illustration of that truth, a gross example which I read in a newspaper the other day: In America a prize is annually given to the man who can eat the largest number of pies at a sitting--each of the pies, a compound of jam and pastry, weighing on an average half a pound. The prize-winner became the external possessor of twenty-seven. But internally he could hardly be said to possess them at all--they possessed him, and made him, one would imagine, a thoroughly ineffective citizen for at least the two or three following days. That man would have been far more really the possessor of three or four pies (seeing that he could have properly digested them) than it was possible for him to be of the twenty-seven. In this excess he merely injured himself without any gain, except the monetary bribe which induced him to make a beast of himself. And how many men are there not, who (receiving the monetary bribe of our present unequal and inequitable system of reward for industry or for idleness) proceed to make beasts of themselves--more elaborately, but just as truly and completely as this pie-eater; and by making beasts of themselves are by so much the less men of soul and understanding--not more, but less the possessors of their human birthright. If we store up treasure materially (treasure of a kind which, if one has more of it, another must needs have less)--if we gather about us, in excess, creature comforts for the over-indulgence of our bodily appetites, we are gathering that which is liable to moth and rust and theft--liable to be a cause of envy and covetousness in others; and when we have gathered to ourselves this excess of perishable delight and have applied it, the result, more likely than not, is a cloying of those very appetites to which we seek to minister--and, eventually, deterioration and enfeeblement of the body itself.