Sermon Thirty-two: DRIVING MERCHANT MENTALITIES FROM OUR SOULS: ECONOMICS AND COMPASSION

“Jesus then went into the temple and drove out all those who were selling and buying there/’ (Mt. 21:12)^a

We read in the Gospel that our Lord went into the temple and threw out those who were buying and selling there. To others who were offering for sale pigeons and similar things he said: “Take all this away . . . !” (Jn. 2:16). Why did Jesus throw out those who were buying and selling, and why did he command those who were offering pigeons for sale to get out? He meant by this only that he wished the temple to be empty, just as if he had wanted to say: “I am entitled to this temple, and wish to be alone here, and to have mastery here.”

What does this mean? This temple, which God wishes to rule over powerfully according to his own will, is the soul of a person. God has formed and created the soul very like himself, for we read that our Lord said: “Let us make human beings in our own image” (Gn. 1:26). And this is what he did. So like to himself did he make the soul of a person that neither in the kingdom of heaven nor on earth among all the splendid creatures that God created in such a wonderful way is there any creature that resembles him as much as does the soul of a human being. For this reason God wishes the temple to be empty so that nothing can be in it but himself alone. This is because this temple pleases him so and resembles him so closely, and because he is pleased whenever he is alone in this temple.

Very well, now pay close attention! Who were the people who were buying and selling in the temple, and who are they still? Now listen to me closely! I shall preach now without exception only about good people. Nevertheless, I shall at this time show who the merchants were then and still are today—those who were buying and selling then, and are still doing so, the ones our Lord whipped and drove out of the temple. And he still is doing so to those who, despite everything, continue to buy and sell in the temple. He will not allow a single one of them to be there. Behold how all those people are merchants who shun great sins and would like to be good and do good deeds in God’s honor, such as fasts, vigils, prayers, and similar good deeds of all kinds. They do these things so that our Lord may give them something, or so that God may do something dear to them. All these people are merchants. This is more or less to be understood since they wish to give one thing in return for another. In this way they wish to bargain with our Lord. They are cheated, however, in this transaction. For everything they possess, and everything they would like to do—if they were to give it all away for God’s sake and if they were to be influenced entirely in accord with God’s sake—God would still not be indebted to them or have to give them anything unless he wanted to do so of his own free will. For whatever they are, they owe to God, and whatever they have, they have from God and not from themselves. Therefore, God is not at all in debt to them for their deeds and gifts unless he should wish to do something of his own free will and favor, and not for the sake of their deeds or gifts. For they give not what is theirs; they achieve nothing by themselves. As Christ himself says: “Without me you can do nothing” (Jn. 15:5).

These people who wish to bargain in this way with our Lord are very silly. They have little wisdom or none at all. Therefore, our Lord threw them out of the temple and drove them away. Light and darkness cannot exist with one another. God is truth and light in himself. When God comes into this temple, he drives out of it uncertainty, which is darkness, and reveals himself with light and truth. The merchants therefore are driven away as soon as truth is known, for truth does not long for any kind of commercial deal. God does not seek his own interest. In all his deeds he is unencumbered and free, and accomplishes them out of genuine love. The person united with God behaves in the same way. This person is unencumbered and free in all his or her deeds, and accomplishes them for God’s honor, seeking no personal interest. And God accomplishes them in this person.

I state further that so long as people by means of all their deeds are seeking anything at all from all that God may be pleased to give, such people resemble the merchants. If you wish to be completely free of this commercial viewpoint so that God may keep you in the temple, whatever deeds you may wish to do, you must accomplish only in praise of God. And you must remain as unfettered by all this as nothingness—which is neither here nor there—is unfettered. You must in no way long for such objects. If you accomplish your deeds in this way, your deeds are spiritual and divine. The merchants are at the same time driven out of the temple, and God is alone within it. For this person has only God in mind. Behold how in this way the temple is rid of the merchants. Behold how people who have neither themselves nor anything besides God alone and God’s honor in mind are truly free and empty of any commercial spirit in all their deeds. Such people seek not their own interests, just as God is unencumbered and free in all his deeds and seeks not his own interests.

I have further stated that our Lord said to the people who were offering pigeons for sale: “Get rid of this, put it away!” He did not drive those people out nor did he scold them severely, but he spoke rather kindly to them: “Get rid of this,” as if he might have wanted to say: “This is, of course, not bad, and yet it is an obstacle to the purer truth.”

These are all good people who accomplish their deeds in relation to their own egos, to time and number, and to what comes before and what comes after. In their deeds they are prevented from attaining the best kind of truth. Such a truth would require them to be free and unencumbered, just as our Lord Jesus Christ is free and unencumbered. For our Lord, in a way that is constantly, unceasingly, and timelessly new, receives himself from his heavenly Father. At the same time our Lord gives rise to himself perfectly, in grateful praise to the Father’s majesty, and with equal honor to himself. This is exactly the same way people should behave who are willing to receive the highest of all truth and live within it without beginning or end. Without hindrance from the deeds they accomplish or the concepts of which they become aware, such people newly receive God’s gift in an unencumbered and free way, and give rise to it again in the same light with grateful praise in our Lord Jesus Christ Thus if the doves were removed, this means the removal of the hindrance and ego connection caused by all the deeds that are otherwise good and in which people do not seek their own interests. Therefore, our Lord said in quite a kindly way: “Get rid of this, put it away!” Just as if he wished to say that it is, of course, good, but it brings a hindrance with it.

If this temple could thus become free of all hindrances, that is to say, from any ego connection and uncertainty, it would gleam so beautifully and shine so purely and clearly over and through everything created by God that no one could match its splendor except the uncreated God. And in all truth no one really resembles this temple except the uncreated God alone. Nothing beneath the angels resembles this temple at all. The highest angels themselves resemble the temple of the noble soul up to a certain degree, but still not completely. The fact that they resemble the soul to a certain degree is proven by knowledge and love. However, a limit has been set for the angels beyond which they cannot go. But the soul can indeed go beyond it. If a soul were to reach the same height as the highest angel—I am speaking of the soul of a person still living in the temporal dimension—such a person in his or her freedom might reach immeasurably higher than the angels in a new and timeless moment. This means without a mode and beyond the mode of the angels and all created understanding.

God alone is free and uncreated, and for this reason he alone is like the soul with respect to freedom, but not with respect to uncreatedness, since the sovl has been created. If the soul comes into the unblended light, it throbs so far into its nothingness and so far away from its created something into nothingness that the soul of its own power cannot return to its created substance. And God places himself with his uncreatedness beneath the soul’s nothingness and upholds the soul in his substance. The soul has dared to come to nothing, and cannot with its own power come back to itself again—so far has the soul left itself before God placed himself beneath the soul. That must of necessity be the case. For as I said earlier: “Jesus went into the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying there, and he said to them: ‘Get rid of this!’ “ Yes, see how now I take the expression: “Jesus went in and began to say to them: ‘Get rid of this!’ and they got rid of it.”

Behold how there was no one there except Jesus alone, and he began to speak in the temple. Behold, this you should truly know, that if anyone wishes to speak in the temple, that is, in the soul, except Jesus, our Lord will remain silent. For the soul has strange guests with whom it is conversing. If, however, Jesus is to speak within the soul, it must be alone and must itself be silent if it is to hear Jesus. In such circumstances he will go inside the soul and begin to speak. What does the Lord Jesus say? He declares what he is. What then is he? He is the Father’s Word. And in this very Word the Father declares himself as well as the whole divine nature and all that God is, just as he knows it. He also knows how God is. And since God is perfect in his knowledge and in his capacity, he is therefore perfect also in his speech. While declaring the Word, he declares himself and all things in another Person, and he gives to the Word the same nature he himself has. And God declares all forms of spirit endowed with reason to be similar in essence to the Word according to the “image,” to the extent that the Word remains within them. These forms of spirit, however, are not like the Word in the way in which the Word gives off light or in the degree to which every form of spirit has distinguished its own being. They—that is to say, the “images” that are given off—have kept, however, the possibility of attaining a grace-giving similarity to the Word. And the Father has declared completely the Word, as it is within itself, and all that is within the Word.

Since the Father has declared this, what does Jesus declare within the soul? As I have said, the Father declares the Word, and either speaks within the Word or not at all. Jesus, however, speaks in the soul. The manner of his speaking is as follows: he reveals himself and everything that the Father has declared in him in the way in which the Spirit is susceptible. He reveals the Father’s ruling power to be an equally immeasurable force in the Spirit. When the Spirit receives this force in and through the Son, the Spirit himself becomes powerful in that progression so that the Spirit becomes equally powerful in all virtues and in perfect purity. As a result, neither love nor sorrow nor all that God has created in time can disturb a human being. Rather such a person remains full of power as if enveloped in a divine strength compared to which all others are small and powerless.

At another time Jesus reveals himself within the soul with the immeasurable wisdom that is himself—the same wisdom with which the Father in his totally paternal ruling power knows himself as well as the Word, which is also wisdom itself, and all the Word contains, since God is one. If this wisdom is joined to the soul, all doubt and all error and all darkness are totally removed, and the soul is brought into a pure, clear light, which is God himself, just as the prophet said: “Lord, in your light we shall know the light” (Ps. 36:9). For God becomes known to God in the soul. Then the soul knows itself and all things with this same wisdom. With the same wisdom the soul knows God himself, and his paternal majesty in its fearful creative power, and the essential original being in one unity without any kind of distinction.

Moreover, Jesus reveals himself with the immeasurable sweetness and fullness that gush out of the power of the Holy Spirit, overflowing and streaming into all sensitive hearts with an abundant fullness and sweetness. When Jesus reveals himself with this fullness and sweetness, and unites himself to the soul, the soul flows with fullness and sweetness into itself, and beyond itself, and beyond all things into its first origin through the action of grace with limitless power. For the external person is obedient to the inner person up to the point of death, and is then in constant peace in God’s service.

May God help us so that Jesus can come into us and throw out and remove all obstacles and make us one being, just as he is one with the Father and the Holy Spirit. May we become one with him and eternally remain with him. Amen.

COMMENTARY:  We Are the Temple, Image, and House of God/ Wonderful and Divine Events Happen in This Temple/ How a Merchant Mentality Destroys a Consciousness of Compassion and Ruins the Soul/How Dualism Is the Sin Behind All Sin

In this sermon Eckhart draws on two Gospel narratives, one from Matthew and one from John, that tell of driving moneylenders from the temple. Following John’s narrative, Eckhart makes a connection between the temple and the person. In John’s case, the sanctuary is that of Jesus and in Eckhart’s application the sanctuary is every person reborn as a son of God. John writes:

Just before the Jewish Passover Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and in the temple he found people selling cattle and sheep and pigeons, and the money changers sitting at their counters there. Making a whip out of some cord, he drove them all out of the temple, cattle and sheep as well, scattered the money changers’ coins, knocked their tables over and said to the pigeon-sellers, “Take all this out of here and stop turning my Father’s house into a market” . . . The Jews intervened and said, “What sign can you show us to justify what you have done?” Jesus answered, “Destroy this sanctuary, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this sanctuary: are you going to raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking of the sanctuary that was his body . . . (Jn. 2:13–16, 18–21; see also Mt. 21:12–17)

This temple, comments Eckhart, is the soul of a person. We who are the image of God, with a soul very like himself, are the new temple. How like God are we, this new temple? The soul’s freedom is without limit—the soul can indeed go beyond the limit that has been set for the angels beyond which they cannot go. Indeed, so full is the soul’s freedom that God alone is like the soul with respect to freedom. Only God is like this temple, only God’s image mirrors it.

We read that our Lord said: “Let us make human beings in our own image” (Gn. 156). And this is what he did. So like to himself did he make the soul of a person that neither in the kingdom of heaven nor on earth among all the splendid creatures that God created in such a wonderful way is there any creature that resembles him as much as does the soul of a human being.

So divine is this temple that is us that in all truth no one really resembles this temple except the uncreated God alone. Nothing beneath the angels resembles this temple at all. So exquisite is the human temple that it would gleam so beautifully and shine so purely and clearly over and through everything created by God that no one could match its splendor except the uncreated God.

Not only is the soul a big and spacious temple, but wonderful and divine things happen in this temple. There, for example, Jesus speaks the full language of revelation. There we are told who God is.

What does the Lord Jesus say? He declares what he is. What then is he? He is the Father’s Word. And in this very Word the Father declares himself as well as the whole divine nature and all that God is, just as he knows it.

Thus the divine Word is uttered in the temple that is us. Nothing is held back. Revelation is full. In this soul Jesus reveals himself and everything that the Father has declared in him in the way in which the Spirit is susceptible. There, too, the power of the Holy Spirit gushes out, overflowing and streaming into all sensitive hearts with an abundant fullness and sweetness. There the soul meets wisdom—the wisdom that is Jesus himself and the wisdom that is the soul’s. Revealed in this wisdom is the fearful creative power of God who creates all energy. So creativity, too, flows from this sacred temple. There the Spirit’s power is revealed as being equal to that of the Creator—the new creation will not be less than the original creation in its beauty and its grace. What happens to a person in touch with this holy temple? Such a person is not easily disturbed and remains full of power as if enveloped in a divine strength. The envelopment of God and the person takes place, the person floats in a sea of divinity, full of God’s creative power. In this temple God becomes known to God—God encounters God in our souls, God speaking to God face to face. This is how holy this temple is. And in this temple, the soul knows itself and all things along with God himself; it also knows the soul’s own essential original being in one unity without any distinction.

What is necessary for these divine and marvelous happenings to occur in the temple that is ourselves? We need to empty the temple, says Eckhart. By our letting go and letting be, as discussed in Path Two, we are able to let God be God in us, to let God fill this temple and sanctify it. To let compassion in, we have to let other energies out. God wishes the temple to be empty so that nothing can be in it but himself alone. In this way we ourselves stay in the temple. One reason for staying in the temple is that God is there or, better, below there. God has placed himself beneath the soul, Eckhart insists, and for the soul who has dared to come to nothing God is present sustaining it. God places himself with his uncreatedness beneath the soul’s nothingness and upholds the soul in his substance. We see here how consistently Eckhart carries on his images of sinking that we saw in Path Two. We sink into God who is under us, under our soul, under our nothingness sustaining us. We also see how thoroughly Eckhart rejects the motif of climbing Jacob’s ladder—for God is not up for Eckhart but innermost and undermost. Those who have learned to let go and let be know this.

But what is *rt that is most cluttering up this temple and most interfering with God’s plan to dwell there? What is preventing compassion from flowing? Eckhart calls it the merchant mentality. So poisonous is the merchant mentality, and so deep does the poison seep, that it creeps into good people’s lives and very often into religious people’s lives. A merchant is one who wants to trade—they wish to give one thing in return for another. Those who build their spirituality around ascetic practices are such religious merchants. In this way they wish to bargain with our Lord.

Behold how all those people are merchants who shun great sins and would like to be good and do good deeds in God’s honor, such as fasts, vigils, prayers, and similar good deeds of all kinds. They do these things so that our Lord may give them something, or so that God may do something dear to them. All these people are merchants.

There is an entire consciousness built up by too many tactical ecstasies or religious exercises—a consciousness of bargaining with God as Other that destroys true spirituality. For, in fact, God is free and need strike up no bargains. Truth does not long for any kind of commercial deal. God does not seek his own interest. Persons acting out of their own egos and with whys and wherefores are trafficking with God—good people included. You must in no way long for such objects, Eckhart warns. We need to rid ourselves of all objects to experience what already is. But a merchant mentality, based on dualisms of subject/object, seller/buyer, money/thing, is all about objects. Any work we ever do can be destroyed by this attitude of putting God in debt to us. God will not be bought. God does not have any price. For everything we do—even the bargaining—is already rooted in God, without whom we can do nothing. Eckhart sounds very much like Luther was to sound on the subject of “good works” two centuries hence.

What happens to merchants in our midst who are busy peddling things that we may or may not need? And who, above all, peddle a thing consciousness that destroys a consciousness of interdependence and compassion? Our Lord whipped them and drove them out of the temple. Eckhart makes it clear that he has his own contemporary culture on his mind and the merchant-mentality persons of that culture, for he insists that he is talking of the merchants who were then and are still today. Apparently not much has changed since Jesus’ time. These merchants were buying and selling then, and are still doing so. And Jesus not only drove them out with whips then but he still is doing so to those who despite everything are still buying and selling in the temple. There can be no question that Eckhart has in mind the merchants of his day and place. Cologne, where Eckhart gave this sermon, was the headquarters of trade for western Europe and eastern Europe.¹ Eckhart’s hearers understood his not-so-hidden references to the economics of his day and Eckhart himself was not worldly unwise or naïve or divorced from the economic turpitude of his time, as certain spiritual commentators of the present time can be. Eckhart knew the repercussions on the imaginations of his listeners from what he was saying and where he was saying it. His attitude toward economics was repeated on several occasions (see, for example, Sermon Thirty-five). He says in another place: “Certain people are more afraid of losing a piece of money, or even a denarius, than God. We condemn Judas because he sold Christ for thirty silver pieces, and yet many persons sell God, truth, justice for a single quarter or even for a penny.”² Eckhart urges us to let go of money from deep inside ourselves. “To forsake money with all one’s heart should not be difficult for the heart; indeed, there is no one who would willingly have money in his heart, for if the money were actually in it, the heart would assuredly die.”³ Money in the heart kills a person. A monied soul is a dead soul.

Eckhart’s criticism of merchant mentalities, or what we today would call capitalism, cuts so deep because it cuts to the level of consciousness. The very word he uses for “attachment” is the word for “ownership,” Eigenschaft. It is the property mentality, the overattachment, indeed, the anal relationship⁴ that we must let go of in order to let God and things be. Ownership or attachment “leaves the mind stupefied and forms an obstacle to receptivity.”⁵ Our letting go ought to have rendered us empty of any commercial deal. A clinging mentality kills the spirit and prevents us from experiencing the ever new gifts that God is showering on us. It also kills the spirit of gratitude and appreciation which, we saw in Path One, is, in the long run, the only and ultimate prayer. Indeed, it kills the gift spirit altogether, since in such a consciousness everything has its price. Only by driving out such mentalities can we newly receive God’s gift in an unencumbered and free way and return it with grateful praise. A merchant mentality destroys all gift consciousness, all true art, therefore (see Sermon Twenty-nine) all celebration and all praise. This is why Jesus, as well as Eckhart, recommends anger and a righteous outrage at the spoilers of the beautiful and divine temple. For a profound sin lurks behind the merchant mentalities.

What is this sin? It is the ultimate sin, the sin behind all sin, the sin of a dualistic consciousness. This sin yanks us out of the sea of God in which we swim interdependently with all creatures. It sets us off from self, others, and God and therefore from interdependence and compassion, which is the law of creation and its goal. It cuts us off from our divine origin, rendering us impure, that is, unable to return to our origin. It thus stifles the energy of the soul that is a new temple that wants to flow with fullness and sweetness into itself, and beyond itself, and beyond all things into its first origin through the action of grace with limitless power. It alone prevents us from being in constant peace in God’s service. For our destiny is that we be made one being, just as he is one with the Father and the Holy Spirit. But dualisms prevent this. They are sin, and the sin behind all sin.

In another sermon Eckhart declares that “a person should be at one with himself or herself.”⁶ When a person is at one with himself or herself, such a person is ready to be truthful to the oneness of creation and oneness with the Creator. But dualisms prevent this consciousness of unity and oneness from happening. As we saw in Sermon Twenty-five, Mary Magdalene complains to the angels at Jesus’ empty tomb that “I find two and am only seeking one.” This experience of the extra other was also treated in the preceding sermon where, as Kelley put it, “there is no other.” We are to live within compassion and truth and within unity and do our deeds from this grounding in unity, Eckhart says in the present sermon. We ought fo receive the highest of all truth and live within it without beginning or end. For Eckhart, sin is a “deprivation or falling off from the good of created nature.”⁷ Sin is a sinful way of seeing the world, of seeing it devoid of its unity, its fullness, its divinity. While Eckhart would acknowledge that original sin “wounds” our way of knowing the world,⁸ he refuses to blame Adam for all our troubles. It is we who are responsible for sin, for we are responsible for our dualistic consciousness. “Nothing more than we ourselves bear the responsibility for the fact that God is concealed from us. We are the cause of all our obstacles.”⁹ The principal obstacle is the way we relate to “objects” and “things,” granting them existence as object which, in fact, they do not have. “You are yourself the very thing by which you are hindered, for you are related to things in an inverted way.”¹⁰ Caputo comments on this remark of Eckhart’s that “the soul has an ‘inverted’ (verkehrt) relationship to things because it views them as things in themselves, independent of God, whereas they are nothing at all, not even something small, outside of God.”¹¹ Here we see the metaphysical/moral implications of panentheism. If outside of God there is nothing but nothing, then sin is a nothing, a form of nonbeing. Eckhart says this. “Sin, however, and evil in general are not beings. For they were not made by him but without him.”¹² In sin we fall out of the circle of being and out of the ocean of divine compassion that permeates all creation into nonbeing and nothingness. When we are outside God and the panentheistic circle of being, God cannot see us. “God does not know anything outside himself, but his eye is fixed only on himself. What he sees, he sees it all in himself. Therefore God does not see us if we are in sin. Hence God knows us as far as we are in him, that is as far as we are without sin.”¹³ When he comments on the creation story in Genesis, Eckhart points out that God called every act of creation “good” or “very good” except one. God never said, when God separated the earth and the sky, that the separation itself was good.¹⁴

The sin of a dualistic consciousness is a subtle, even demonic, evil that hides behind good works and good people. Eckhart says this sermon is directed exclusively at good people. The commercial and merchandising mentality is not always and evidently evil in itself. But behind it, because behind it there lies dualism, there is coiled a power and principality that must be driven entirely out of the temple.

Because the sin behind sin is a dualistic consciousness, it is also a superficial consciousness, a consciousness of an “outer” as distinct from an “inner” person. Evil and sin are outsiders. Evil “stands outside, draws and directs things outward, distracts from inner things, draws to what is other, smacks of otherness, of division, of withdrawal or falling away.”¹⁵ To fall into superficiality and outemess is falling into sin and vice versa. Sin, then, becomes a betrayal of the imago Dei that we are, a betrayal of the temple that is as deep as the fathomless ocean and as vast as space. If, as Eckhart says, the inward person is “spatiosissimus—most spacious” and is “great without magnitude,” then it is this vastness that distinguishes the inner from the outer person. “Although the inward man and the outward person may be seen together at the same time and place, they are nevertheless further removed from one another than the highest heaven and the center of the earth.”¹⁶ Sin then becomes “a contraction of awareness”¹⁷ that results in a contraction of our being, a contraction of the temple that we are, a contraction of God’s oceanic energy called compassion. Sin is a drying up, a settling for puniness in the midst of potential divine vastness and oceanic invitations. Aquinas had taught that accidie was “a contraction of the mind”¹⁸ and a flight from our divinity. Eckhart is, in effect, suggesting that accidie becomes a sinful consciousness that lurks behind all other acts of dualism and alienation. When he says that Jesus “has liberated us from our sins,”¹⁹ he also points out that we are to become free and unencumbered, just as our Lord Jesus Christ is free and unencumbered. We should behave in exactly the same way. Free of dualisms, free of objects, free of thing consciousness:

Our Lord in a way that is constantly, unceasingly, and timelessly new receives himself from his heavenly Father. At the same time, our Lord gives rise to himself perfectly, in grateful praise to the Father’s majesty, and with equal honor to himself . . . Without hindrance from the deeds they accomplish or the concepts of which they become aware, such people [who behave as Jesus does] newly receive God’s gift in an unencumbered and free way, and give rise to it again in the same light with grateful praise in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Thus we—the new temple and the receivers of a new creation—are, like Jesus, reborn, risen again, and ready to receive new power and light from divinity. Instead of fleeing creation and its goodness, we will look on it in a new way. Like the wisdom theology of the Bible that declares that “creation does not only exist, it also discharges truth,”²⁰ Eckhart wants us to see this truth. Caputo explains that

in Eckhart’s teaching, all the fault is to be laid at the feet of man himself, of the “ego.” It is wholly and solely because man looks upon things in the wrong way that things present an obstacle to him. There is nothing wrong with things or people or places; it is the way we look upon them which is at fault. The world which God “gives” us is resplendent with divine being and beauty.²¹

Eckhart has suggested in not overly subtle terms that our economic systems can be guilty of distorting this view of God’s creation, bathed as it is in a sea of compassion. It is no small criticism and it is one that got him in a great deal of difficulty, from which now, six hundred years later, he is beginning to be extricated. For his radical critique of the merchant mentality was no small factor in his condemnation.²² A change in consciousness implies a change in society and its institutions and a change in how we work, why we work, and what we work at. For Eckhart is not intent on merely driving merchant mentalities from our church vestibules; he insists that we drive them right out of our souls themselves. He is calling, from the very bosom of the trade capital of his day, for a holy economic exorcism.