Mammon Author:John Harris Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SECTION III. ALL SIN IS SELFISHNESS. Accordingly, selfishness, as we have already intimated, is the universal form of human depravity ; every sin that can ... more »be named is only a modification of it. What is avarice, but selfishness grasping and hoarding ? What is prodigality, but selfishness decorating and indulging itself—a man sacrificing to himself as his own god ? What is sloth, but that god asleep, and refusing to attend to the loud calls of duty ? And what is idolatry, but that god enshrined— man, worshipping the reflection of his own image ? Sensuality, and, indeed, all the sins of the flesh, are only selfishness setting itself above law, and gratifying itself at the expense of all restraint. And all the sins of the spirit are only the same principle impatient of contradiction, and refusing to acknowledge superiority, or to bend to any will but its own. What is egotism, but selfishness speaking ? Or crime, but selfishness, without its mask, in earnest, and acting ? Or offensive war, but selfishness confederated, armed, and bent on aggrandizing itself by violence and blood ? An offensive army is the selfishness of a nation embodied, and moving to the attainment of its object over the wrecks of human happiness and life. " From whence come wars and fighting among you T Come they not hence, even of your lusts ? '.' And what are all these irregular and passionate desires, but that inordinate self-love which acknowledges no law, and will be confined by no rules—that selfishness which is the heart of depravity?—and what but this has set the world at variance, and filled it with strife? The first presumed sin of the angels that kept not their first estate, as well as the first sin of man,— what was it but selfishness insane ? an irrational and mad attempt to pass the limits pr...« less