94. But suppose the ballance on the other side, let me ask you one plain question. For what gain (setting conscience aside) will you be obliged to act thus? To live exactly as I do? For what price will you preach (and that with all your might, not in an _easy, indolent, fashionable_ way) eighteen or nineteen times every week? And this throughout the year? What shall I give you, to travel seven or eight hundred miles, in all weathers, every two or three months? For what salary will you abstain from all other diversions, than the doing good, and the praising God? I am mistaken if you would not prefer strangling to such a life, even with thousands of gold and silver. 95. And what is the comfort you have found out for me in these circumstances? Why, that “I shall not die a beggar.” So now I am supposed to be heaping up riches,――“that I may leave them behind me.” Leave them behind me! For whom? My wife and children? Who are they? They are yet unborn. Unless thou meanest the children of faith whom God hath given me. But my heavenly Father feedeth them. Indeed if I lay up riches at all, it must be _to leave behind me_: (seeing my fellowship is a provision for life.) But I cannot understand this. What comfort would it be to my soul, now launched into eternity, that I had _left behind me_ gold as the dust, and silver as the sand of the sea? Will it follow me over the great gulph? Or can I go back to it? Thou that liftest up thy eyes in hell, what do thy riches profit thee now? Will all thou once hadst under the sun, gain thee a drop of water to cool thy tongue? O the comfort of riches left _behind_ to one who is tormented in that flame!――You put me in mind of those celebrated lines (which I once exceedingly admired) addressed by way of consolation to the soul of a poor self-murderer: “Yet shall thy grave with rising flowers be drest, And the green turf lie light upon thy breast! Here shall the year its earliest beauties shew: Here the first roses of the spring shall blow: While angels with their silver wings o’er shade The place now sacred by thy relics made.”