Fatal prosperity
It is certainly not incumbent on the Christian preacher to maintain that prosperity is in itself an evil. This would involve a strange paradox, since it must be confessed that we all desire prosperity by natural instinct, and seek it in some form, and when we have met with it are exhorted to be thankful for it; all of which things would need to be deprecated if prosperity were essentially evil. So far is it from being thus represented in the Bible, that the Old Testament regards it as the reward of righteousness, and the New Testament as less important indeed and more full of danger, yet still as something to be enjoyed gratefully (see 1 Timothy 4:4). But experience and revelation both warn us that it brings peculiar perils and temptations, and that there are some people to whom it is nothing less than fatal.
I. CONSIDER WHO ARE THE PERSONS TO WHOM PROSPERITY IS MOST FATAL. It does not affect all alike. One man can stand calmly on a steep height where another reels with giddiness. The success which is fatal to one may develop magnanimous qualities in another. It is not all prosperity, but the prosperity of fools, that is destructive. The character of the men rather than the inherent evil of the thing determines its effects. Note some of the characters most injured by prosperity.
1. The weak, who are moulded by circumstances instead of mastering them. If a man is not strong enough to direct his course, but suffers himself to drift with the currents of external events, prosperity will lead him away into extravagance and folly. He only is safe under it who is independent of it.
2. The short-sighted—men whose views of life are exceptionally limited. These people will be likely to expect too much from prosperity, to forget that riches take to themselves wings and fly away.
3. The empty minded. If people have other resources than external possessions they are the more free to make good use of those possessions. But if they have nothing else, if they have no "inner city of the mind," if their life is all on the outside, prosperity will become a god and the idolatry of it a fatal delusion.
4. The vicious. A bad man will find in prosperity only enlarged means for evil doing, and so will increase his wickedness and bring the greater doom upon his own head. To the intemperate, the profligate, the lovers of corrupt pleasures, prosperity is nothing less than a curse.
II. CONSIDER THE WAY IN WHICH PROSPERITY BECOMES FATAL.
1. It hides folly. La Bruyere says, "As riches and favour forsake a man, we discover him to be a fool, but nobody could find it out in his prosperity;" and Hare remarks that "nothing hides a blemish so completely as a cloth of gold." But if folly is hidden, it is unchecked, and grows worse and ripens fatally.
2. It encourages indolence. Prosperity may afford ample means for generous occupation, but weak and foolish people are more likely to be satisfied with idleness and self-indulgence when they find that all their wants are supplied without any effort on their own part. Then the disuse of faculties leads to the loss of them. Hence, as the pressure of adversity quickens our powers, the relaxation of prosperity tends to a sort of atrophy of them.
3. It affords opportunity for the exercise of bad qualities. Many men have tendencies to particular kinds of sin that are checked for want of opportunity. Prosperity will give this with fatal results.
4. It induces satisfaction with itself. Thus it quenches the thirst for deeper satisfaction. Lot, prosperous in Sodom, ceases to be a "pilgrim and stranger," and forgets to seek a "better country" till he is roused by the shock that puts an end w his worldly successes.
HOMILIES BY E. JOHNSON