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I do not know that the age in which Simon lived was especially a commercial age; but whatever may have been its distinctive peculiarity, there cannot be much doubt about ours. There have been successive ages, each of a characteristic type, as, e.g., the age of the shepherds, illustrated in the long centuries of pastoral life in the East; the age of conquest, as depicted in the story of the Persian kings; the age of the arts and of letters, as seen in Greece; the age of civic rule and military despotism, as revealed in the history of Rome; the age of religious enthusiasm, as traceable in the history of the middle ages and the crusades; the age of luxury, as found in the France of the Louises, and of revolution, as found in the France of the Buonapartes. But, though in all of them men recognised the uses of wealth, and sought it, in no one of them was the conception of its capabilities so fevered and exaggerated as in our own. We are living in times when men not merely believe that wealth is of all things the most desirable (men have believed that from the time of the rich young man), but when they believe also that there is nothing that cannot be purchased with money. And therefore it is that this answer of Peter is so timely. "This power you covet is communicable, but you cannot buy it! You have seen these common people quickened into a disclosure of powers such as your poor arts have never dreamed of; but the wealth of an empire could not purchase the least or lowliest of them." "Well, what of it?" one might answer. They are not the gifts and powers that I crave. But the things I do crave can be purchased with money. I look about me and see that there is nothing so potent as wealth. I find that in society nothing covers so many faults as money; that neither birth nor death are separate from the questions, "What will he inherit?" or "What did he leave?" That while we scorn the French .marriage of convenience in name, we observe in fact; that poverty, if not a disgrace, is an impertinence; that every taste that I cultivate makes wealth more desirable and poverty more irksome; that while I can acquire the habits of luxurious living with facility, I can surrender them only with pain; and finally that, no matter how selfish or unscrupulous has been my career, it is only necessary that it shall have been exceptionally successful to secure for me, when dying, the applause of mankind. Wherein, then, consists the folly or even the error in my owning also that everything that I do care for can be purchased with money? That error and that folly consist in this: that these gifts of the Spirit which Simon would fain have bought with money are but the type of every other best gift in all the world, and that of these as of those, it is everlastingly true that they are not for sale. Recall some of them for a moment, and see if it is not so.

I. HEALTH. Some of us have drifted into one of those European refuges of the invalid like Ems or Karlsbad; places where people whose lungs or limbs or livers are diseased have come together to drink the waters and submit to the regimen, or be washed whole again in the baths. Oh, those melancholy processions of gloomy-visaged and despondent men and women! I have heard of one of them bursting into a storm of passionate denunciation because a healthy-looking servant had entered his apartment. How dared such an one insult him with the offensive contrast of her unwelcome presence! And yet the one was only a peasant girl, and the other a prince and a millionaire. Would he not have been willing to have shared his millions if he could have bought with them the other's single gift of health? Unfortunately, however, it is not for sale.

II. Next in rank is that higher boon of MENTAL CULTURE. There are hundreds of thousands of men and women who rarely know a day without an experience of pain, who yet are possessors of a secret which makes them habitually insensible to it. There are accomplishments in which they can so lose themselves that, for the time, nothing unwelcome really touches them; and above all, in the pages of a book, they can so pass out of the consciousness of their outer world into the consciousness of that inner world to which the poet, or the historian has introduced them, that penury and loneliness and pain will be for the time being forgotten. But such a pleasure as this is not purchasable. Indeed, just because high living is usually so fatal to high thinking, the pleasures of culture are almost prohibited to the merely rich. Now it does not matter that such persons have never known (because incapable of knowing) the joys of high intellectual activity and so cannot greatly miss what they have never tasted. What they do know is that weariness of ennui, that proneness to idle gossip, to coarser indulgence which is the everlasting tendency of an habitually luxurious life. So thoroughly is this understood where wealth is hereditary that occupations have to be created as a defence against the dangers of their peculiar circumstances. But when such occupations are wanting, the intellectual apathy is at times a hideous and appalling nightmare.

III. More tragically is this true in the domain of the AFFECTIONS. Love is not for sale; and That mysterious sentiment which must be won and deserved — not purchased, never goes along with a jointure nor can be made over with transfers of real estate. There have been plenty of people with no capacity for such an affection who have bartered themselves for some one else's possessions, but in selling their persons or their accomplishments they have usually sold all that they had to sell The power of greatly and unselfishly loving another was not in them, and what they had not to deliver they could not sell. But, where in any man or woman there has been such a capacity, the heart has steadily and invariably refused to follow the beckoning of mere worldly possessions. If any one else loves us, we may be sure that it is not for what we have, but for what we are.

IV. And that reminds me of one other unpurchasable possession — A GOOD CONSCIENCE, or peace of mind. The world has always had in it people who, having lived selfish lives, have striven, before they were done with life, to square accounts by the lavish distribution of their means. All along they have been uncomfortably conscious of the compassion of thoughtful men and quiet women. And when they have encountered such they have been dimly sensible that these people had a secret of peace, of hopeful and certain anticipation, of which they themselves knew nothing. Oh, what would they not give if they could buy that! Nay, more, as they look backward what else would they not give if they but had it to give, if somehow they could transform those cruel and accusing memories. But that peace of God which passeth all understanding, passeth all price as well! Conclusion: I want to say one word to the young. You are living in an atmosphere where the loudest bid that is made is the bid for money. Be afraid of an idolatry so poor and mean! Money, in itself considered, is neither good nor bad. It is an instrument. You may have it without being bad and you may be without it without being good. But to live for it, to fret because you are without it, is the death of all nobleness and the doom of aspiration, There must have been some hours in your life when your heart has thrilled with a genuine aspiration, and when, sitting alone, you have pored over the page that has told you of the great names that have made humanity immortal, and who, as they moved onward and upward have left behind them the lustre of a nobility that can never pale. And at such moments, surely you have longed to be like those nobler beings and to follow their radiant footsteps. Cling to that longing and follow it, for, sooner or later, this love of goodness will bring you into the presence of One who is the divinest of all. And yet, how poor He was! How utterly and absolutely Christ triumphed without the aid of money. Nowadays there is no enterprise, however uoworldly its aims, that must not rest upon a pecuniary basis. And yet there has lived in the world One, who from first to last was penniless. Since He came and went away, what colossal fortunes have been heaped up, what mighty combinations of capital have ruled the credit of the civilised world and made even princes and sovereigns to fawn obsequiously upon their possessors. What has become of them? Who remembers them? But all the while the sway of that Galilean peasant who had not where to lay His head, broadens and deepens and advances. Would you possess the secret of His resistless spell? Verily, if like Simon you come to buy it with mere money, you and your money shall most surely perish together. But if you come discerning that the gifts of God are gifts which money cannot purchase, then indeed you may hope to learn that secret, which shall make you rich for ever!

(Bp. H. C. Potter, D. D.)

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KJV: But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.

WEB: But Peter said to him, "May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money!