never known a man to borrow any money of the bank on the unctuosity of his amen, but I have known people who could double-discount Satan himself at dodging an honest debt, to weep real water because I declined to come into their sectarian penfold and be measured for a suit of angelic pin-feathers. There are many church people who will slander you unmercifully for dissenting from their religious dogma, then seize the first opportunity to stick you with a plugged dime or steal your dog. There are worshippers who do not consider in outward rites and specious forms religion satisfied; but these never accumulate vast fortunes. The path to heaven is too steep to be scaled by a man weighted down with seven million dollars. He may be long on hope and faith, but he's short on charity, and without charity religion is as big a fraud as McKinley's international bimetallism. Charity is a word that is awfully misunderstood. If a man's income be $5,000 a year and he gives half of it to the less fortunate, he's a pretty decent fellow, but if he reserves for himself half of a $100,000 income while people are going hungry to bed, he's simply a brute. With a world full of woe and want, what right has any professed follower of Jesus to shove $50,000 a year down his jeans? The true test of a man's charity is the sum which he reserves for himself; hence when Jno. D. Rockefeller--my good Baptist brother who's building collegiate monuments to his own memory with other people's money--reserves tens o' millions in excess of his needs and imagines himself full to the muzzle with the grace of God, he's simply chasing a rainbow that may land him in Malebolge with the dull sudden plunk of a Republican campaign promise hitting the tidal wave of prosperity. Imagine Jesus Christ with John D.'s money--loaning it at 5 per cent. a month! Why if he'd had half so much cash he'd never have been crucified. Those who clamored for his death would have run him for mayor of Jerusalem on the reform ticket and tried to work him for his last dollar. . . .