“[Dabney] urged young Southerners to remember certain unchangeable principles that formed his theological response to the economic realities of the new South — in particular, the principle that God was the true owner of all property and wealth; humans simply used property as stewards. Dabney taught that God’s Word outlined three appropriate purposes for wealth: personal sustenance, family need, and insurance against the future. Wealth was certainly not to be used in “superfluities” or on luxuries, which only produced a worldly conformity, led others to covet, and ruined one’s own character. Such unproductive consumption was a “waste and perversion of a trust that should have been sacred to noble and blessed ends.” Instead, excess wealth was to be used for evangelism and other ministries, for “every ignorant, degraded man who is enlightened and sanctified becomes at once a useful producer of material wealth, for he is rendered an industrious citizen. And every heathen community that is evangelized becomes a recipient and a producer of the wealth of peaceful commerce.”” (Sean Michael Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney, 189).