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My text introduces us into a fine farm-house. The occupant 'has been wonderfully successful. He has not made his money by business dodges. He has never "cornered" anybody in stocks. He never lent money on a mortgage with the understanding that it might lie quiet for several years, and then, as soon as the mortgage was recorded, went down to begin foreclosure. He never got up a bogus company, sold the shares, and then backed out in time to save himself, leaving the widows and orphans in the lurch, wondering why there were no dividends. As far as I can tell, he was an honest, industrious, enterprising man. The crops were coming in. The mow and the granary were full, and the men and oxen tugged away at other loads. The matter was a great perplexity. After you have gone to the trouble to raise a crop, you want some place to put it. Enlargement is the word. I see him calculating, by the light of a torch, how much extension of room is needed. So many loads of corn, so many of wheat. It must be so many feet front, and so many feet deep. He says, " When I get the new building done, I shall have everything. Nothing then for me but to enjoy myself." In anticipation of the barn enlarged, he folds his arms and says, "If anybody in all the world is prosperous and happy, I am that man." But his ear is stunned with the words, "Thou fool!" "Where did the voice come from?" "Who dares say that to me, the first man in all this country?" It was the voice of God t "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee!" What was the malady that took him immediately away? — whether apoplexy, or some mysterious disease that the doctors could not account for — I know not. But that night he expired. He never built the extension. Before the remaining sheaves had been gathered he was himself reaped. They hauled in no loads of grain on the next day, but a long procession (for successful men always have big funerals) followed him out to burial. If the world expressed its sentiments in regard to him, it would put over his grave, "Here lies interred a successful man, of great enterprise and influence, and he departs mourned by the whole neighbourhood. Peace to his ashes." God wrote over his grave, and on his barn-door, an epitaph of four letters — "Fool." That the Divine epitaph was correct, I infer from the fact that this man had lived so many years and made no preparation for the future, and because he was postponing everything until he got larger barns. Additional barn-room could not make him happy. Show me the man made happy by worldly accumulation. He does not exist.

(Dr. Talmage.)

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KJV: And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully:

WEB: He spoke a parable to them, saying, "The ground of a certain rich man brought forth abundantly.