Here there was a pause for a few moments, and then I put in a word to the effect that it would be difficult to commend a gospel of content to Poverty.
"But," said Vernet, "it will be addressed more to the rich and well-to-do, as you call them, bidding them be content with enough. Not forbidding them to strive for more than enough--that would never do. The good of mankind demands that all its energies should be maintained, but not that its energies should be meanly employed in grubbing for the luxury that is no enjoyment but only a show, or that palls as soon as it is once enjoyed, and then is no more felt as luxury than the labourer's second pair of boots or the mechanic's third shirt a week. For the men of thousands per annum the Gospel of Content would be the wise, wise, wise old injunction to plain living and high thinking, only with one addition both beautiful and wise: kind thinking, and the high and the kind thinking made good in deed. And it would work, this gospel; we may be sure of it already. For luxury has became _common_; it is being found out. Where there was one person at the beginning of the century who had daily experience of its fatiguing disappointments, now there are fifty. Like everything else, it loses distinction by coming abundantly into all sorts of hands; and meanwhile other and nobler kinds of distinction have multiplied and have gained acknowledgment. And from losing distinction--this you must have observed--luxury is becoming vulgar; and I don't know why the time should be so very far off when it will be accounted shameful. Certain it is that year by year a greater number of minds, and such as mostly determine the currents of social sentiment, think luxury _low_; without going deeper than the mere look of it, perhaps. These are hopeful signs. Here is good encouragement to stand out and preach a gospel of content which would be an education in simplicity, dignity, happiness, and yet more an education of heart and spirit. For nothing that a man can do in this world works so powerfully for his own spiritual good as the habit of sacrifice to kindness. It is so like a miracle that it is, I am sure, the one way--the one way appointed by the laws of our spiritual growth.