Money is a dangerous thing

money trap flagMoney generally binds your hands. It gives you less power instead of more. It diminishes your love; it reduces your benevolence and your will to do and to give. The richer you get, the poorer you become; not only spiritually, toward God, but often in actual fact here and now. When you had but one dollar in the world, how readily you gave half of it or all of it to some work of love, some brother in need! When you had ten dollars you could still part with two or three gladly. But you got a hundred, and thought you were wonderfully liberal when you handed out ten; and when it was a thousand, you considered fifty a great amount to give; and when you had ten thousand you gave a hundred and felt like a saint over it. So as money increased your gifts decreased; from a hundred per cent and fifty per cent you dropped down to twenty, from twenty to ten, then to five, then to one per cent. Tell me, why does a man do that? Is it not that money appeals to the accumulative instinct and possession stimulates the desire to possess? And this becomes a parasite vine that twines around the tree and sucks its sap and smothers its life until some spring, when all the trees are budding, the vine clad victim’s branches remain dry and bare. So is the heart that is accursed with the love of money.

Robert H. Boll
Truth and Grace (1917)