Judas the pursebearer was, as a French divine characterizes him, _exact_, _positif_, _calculateur_; one who habituated himself to compute everything by a ready-money standard, and to appraise every action by the rule of immediate utility. He might be accurate to a fraction in his reckoning of what that “wasted” ointment would have fetched in the market; but, had not his heart been already in some sort ossified, he would have comprehended that “au dessus de l’utile il y a le beau, et au dessus du calcul le dévouement, et qu’ à une âme qui déborde d’une joie extraordinaire il faut des moyens extraordinaires aussi pour exprimer ce qu’elle éprouve. Judas a perdu le sens des réalités purement spirituelles, qui lui paraissent vagues, parce que, comme l’infini, elles résistent aux chiffres.” When Dr. Justus Jonas told Dr. Martin Luther of a certain potent landholder, who said to Duke John Frederic, when commending to him the gospel of Christ, “Sir, the gospel pays no interest,”—“Have you no grains?” was Luther’s interrogative comment,—citing the words of the swine at the lion’s feast, when invited to feast on recondite dainties. Even so, said Dr. Martin, there are inveterate worldlings who, when invited to the spiritual feast of fat things well refined, “turn up their snouts, and ask for guilders. Offer a cow nutmeg, and she will reject it for old hay.” It is a too true bill of indictment against the mass of men, that, knowing that two and two make four, and that four is of a higher value than three, they practically conclude, carrying out into practice the conclusion, that to amass is to become wealthy, and that to bestow is to become the poorer. With this arithmetic the children of this world are wise in their generation, and add field to field, house to house, to some purpose. But by what right, asks a voice from the sanctuary, do they take upon themselves to pronounce on such qualities and realities as devotion and charity, as detachment from the “good things of this life” and renunciation of indulgence to the senses? If they witness a deed of noble self-sacrifice, they can but wag their heads, in shocked surprise and bewilderment at such a blunder in arithmetic, _une telle faute de calcul_. “Ils ne comprennent pas qu’on puisse soupirer après d’autres biens que ceux de la matière, après d’autres vérités que celles de l’arithmétique.” There are many, very many more things than are dreamt of in their philosophy; dreaming, indeed, is rather out of their way; and perhaps philosophy too, for the matter of that.