beasts tearing women and children, became more of a necessity to their
appetites. Take two instances. Titus was a rough, hardened soldier; but he
wept at the horrors which his siege obliged him to inflict on Jerusalem.
Nero was an artist, and fiddled while Rome was burning. Coddle your boys;
you may keep them from wishing to fight their equals, but you will not cure
them of torturing animals. Idleness means not only sluggishness, but a
morbid and criminal desire for sensation, which honest industry would have
sweated out of the flesh. Money often renders those who have it
unconsciously impatient with the slowness of poorer men, and unconsciously
insolent about their defects. Everywhere, on the high places of history,
and within our own humble experience, we perceive the same truth, that
materialism, and the temper which trusts in wealth or in success, does not
turn men into fat oxen, but into tigers. Hence the frequency with which the
Old Testament, and especially the Psalms, connect an abundance of wealth
with a strength of wickedness, and bracket for the same degree of doom the
rich man and the violent one. Our Psalm is natural in adding to the clause,
_trusting in the abundance of riches,_ that other about _strengthening
himself in wickedness_. This is the very temper of a prosperous and
pampered life: which seeks lust or cruelty not to forget itself, as a
stunted and tortured nature may be forgiven for doing, but in order to work
off its superfluous blood.

Observe, too, how much sins of the tongue are mentioned,-, lying,
backbiting and the love of swallowing men's reputations whole. _Thou lovest
all words of voracity, thou tongue of deceit_. We are, too, apt to think
that sins of speech most fiercely beset weak and puny characters: men that
have no weapon but a sharp and nasty tongue. Yet none use their words more
recklessly than the strong, who have not been sobered by the rebuffs and
uncertainties of life. Power and position often make a man trifle with the
truth. A big man's word carries far, and he knows it; till the temptation