The finest and, in the long run, the most influential minds, have for the most part not cared for riches, or not cared enough to go out of their way to seek them, preferring to live on bare necessities if they must rather than spend their lives in an uncongenial scramble. And the distinctively spiritual leaders have always regarded them as inconsistent with their aims. “Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves.” Not that Christianity is opposed to industrial prosperity—the contrary is the case—but that Christian leadership required the explicit renunciation of prosperity’s besetting sin. In our day the life of Thoreau, among others, illustrates how a man may have the finer products of wealth—the culture of all times—while preferring to remain individually poor. He held that for an unmarried student, wishing first of all to preserve the independence of his mind, occasional day labor, which one can do and have done with, is the best way of getting a living. “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” “It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.”[115] The thoroughgoing way in which this doctrine is developed in his Walden and other books makes them a _vade mecum_ for the impecunious idealist. Professor William James asserts that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which civilization suffers, paralyzing their ideal force. “Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation.”[116] If these considerations do not keep us from greed, it is because most of us have only flashes of the higher ambition. We may believe that we could reconcile ourselves to poverty if we had to—even that it might be good for us—but we do our best to avoid it.