Few people think of the danger of getting rich. Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit priest, said that among all the thousands of men who had come to him with confession of sin, not one had ever confessed the sin of covetousness.
Men think they become great just in proportion as they gather wealth. Yet there never was a more fatal error. A man is really measured by what he is, not by what he has. We may find a shriveled soul in the midst of a great fortune and a noble soul in the barest poverty. A man’s real “life” is what would be left of him if everything he has were stripped off. It is his character as it appears in God’s sight. So we will make a great mistake if we set out in life merely to gather this world’s things about us.