The Religious Herald

Covetousness.

Of the peculiar baseness of the vice of covetousness we need no other proof but this; for as the prime and more essential property of goodness is to communicate and diffuse itself, so in the same degree that anything encloses and shuts up its plenty within itself, in the same it recedes and falls off from the nature of good. If we cast our eyes over the whole creation, we shall find every part of the universe contributing something or other either to the help or ornament of the whole. The great business of Providence is to be continually issuing out fresh supplies of the divine bounty to the creature that lives and subsists like a lamp fed by continual infusions, and from the same hand which lights and sets it up. So that covetousness is nothing so much as a grand contradiction to Providence, whilst it terminates wholly within itself.—South,