S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.
Money
Gold is a wonderful clearer of the understanding: it dissipates every doubt and scruple in an instant; accommodates itself to the meanest capacities; silences the loud and clamorous, and brings over the most obstinate and inflexible. Philip of Macedon was a man of most invincible reason this way. He refuted by it all the wisdom of Athens, confounded their statesmen, struck their orators dumb, and at length argued them out of all their liberties.
Money does all things; for it gives and it takes away, it makes honest men and knaves, fools and philosophers; and so forward, mutatis mutandis, to the end of the chapter.
It is wonderful to consider how a command or call to be liberal, either upon a civil or religious account, all of a sudden impoverishes the rich, breaks the merchant, shuts up every private mans exchequer, and makes those men in a minute have nothing who, at the very same instant, want nothing to spend. So that, instead of relieving the poor, such a command strangely increases their number, and transforms rich men into beggars presently.
The love of money is a vertiginous pool, sucking all into it to destroy it. It is troubled and uneven, giddy and unsafe, serving no end but its own, and that also in a restless and uneasy motion. But the love of God is a holy fountain, limpid and pure, sweet and salutary, lasting and eternal. The love of God spends itself upon Him, to receive again the reflections of grace and benediction: the love of money spends all its desires upon itself, to purchase nothing but unsatisfying instruments of exchange or supernumerary provisions, and ends in dissatisfaction, emptiness of spirit, and a bitter curse.