“In the eyes of the world, a man may acquire, and through a long life maintain, a character for liberality and spirit, while his heart all the time goeth after his covetousness. His hand, like a channel, may be ever open; and because his income is perpetually flowing through it, the unreflecting world, taken with appearances, hold him up as a pattern of generosity; but the entire current is absorbed by his own selfishness.
That others are indirectly benefited by his profusion, does not enter into his calculations; he thinks only of his own gratification. It is true his mode of living may employ others; but he is the idol of the temple, they are only priests in his service; and the prodigality they are empowered to indulge in, is only intended to decorate and do honour to his altar.
To maintain an expensive establishment, to carry it high before the world, to settle his children respectably in life, to maintain a system of costly self-indulgence—these are the objects which swallow up all his gains, and keep him in a constant fever of ill-concealed anxiety; filling his heart with envy and covetousness at the sight of others’ prosperity; rendering him loath to part with a fraction of his property to benevolent purposes; making him feel as if every farthing of his money so employed were a diversion of that farthing from the great ends of life; and causing him even to begrudge the hallowed hours of the Sabbath as so much time lost (if, indeed, he allows it to be lost) to the cause of gain.
New channels of benevolence may open around him in all directions; but as far as he is concerned, those channels must remain dry, for, like the sands of the desert, he absorbs all the bounty which Heaven rains on him, and still craves for more. What but this is commonly meant by the expression concerning such a man, that “he is living up to his income?”
John Harris in Mammon: Or Covetousness the Sin of the Christian Church (London: Thomas Ward and Company, 1836) 62-63.