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The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, January 21, 1868

FromReview and Herald, Vol. XXXI, No. 6

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A MISER'S DEATH.

By Geo. Lippard

THE ALMIGHTY DOLLAR.

They brought him a dollar.
He took it, clutched it in his long, skinny fingers, tried its sound against the bed-post, and then gazed on it long and patiently with his dull, leaden eyes.
That day, in the hurry of business, Death had struck him, even in the street. He was hurrying to collect the last month's rent, and was on the verge of the miserable court, where his tenants herded like beasts in their kennels—he was there, with his hand-book in his hand, when Death laid his iron hand upon him.
He was carried home to his splendid mansion. He was laid on a bed with a satin coverlet. The lawyer, the relations and the preacher were sent for. All day long he lay without speech, moving his right hand, as though in the act of counting money.
At midnight he spoke.
He asked for a dollar, and they brought one to him, and lean and gaunt he sat up in his death-bed, and clutched it with the grip of death.
A shaded lamp stood on a table near the silken bed. Its light fell faintly around the splendid room, where chairs, and carpets, and mirrors, silken bed and lofty ceiling—all said, Gold! as plainly as human lips can say it.
His hair and eyebrows were white. His cheek sunken, and his lips thin and surrounded by wrinkles that indicated the passion of Avarice. As he sat up in his bed, with his neck bared and the silken coverlet wrapped about his lean frame, his white hair and eyebrows contrasted with his wasted and wrinkled face, he looked like a ghost. And there was life in his leaden eye—all that life centered on the dollar, which he gripped in his clenched fist.
His wife, a pleasant-faced, matronly woman, was seated at the foot of his bed. His son, a young man of twenty-one, dressed in the latest fashion, sat by the lawyer. The lawyer sat before the table, pen in hand, and gold spectacles on his nose. There was a huge parchment spread before him.
“Do you think he will make a will?” asked the son.
“Hardly compos mentis yet,” was the whispered reply. “Wait. He'll be lucid after a while.”
“My dear,” said the wife, “had not I better send for a preacher?”
She arose and took her dying husband by the hand, but he did not mind. His eyes were upon the dollar.
He was a rich man. He owned palaces on Walnut and Chestnut streets, and hovels and courts in the outskirts. He had iron mines in this State; copper mines on the lakes somewhere; he had golden interests in California. His name was bright upon the records of twenty banks; he owned stocks of all kinds; he had half a dozen papers in his pay.
He knew but one crime—to be in debt without the power to pay.
He knew but one virtue—to get money.
That crime he had never forgiven—this virtue he had never forgotten, in the long way of thirty-five years.
To hunt down a debtor, to distress a tenant, to turn a few additional thousands by a sharp speculation—these were the main achievements of his life.
He was a good man—his name was upon a silver plate upon the pew door of a velvet-cushioned church.
He was a benevolent man—for every thousand dollars he wrung from the tenants, from his courts, or from the debtors who writhed beneath his heel, he gave ten dollars to some benevolent institution.
He was a just man—the gallows and the jail always found in him a faithful and unswerving advocate.
And now he is a dying man—see! as he sits upon the bed of death, with the dollar in his clenched hand.
O holy dollars, object of his life-long pursuit, what comfort hast thou for him now in his pain of death?
At length the dying man revived and dictated his will. It was strange to see the mother, and son, and lawyer, muttering—and sometimes wrangling—beside the bed of death. All the while the testator clutched the dollar in his right hand.
While the will was being made, the preacher came—even he who held the pastoral charge of the church, whose pew doors bore saintly names on silver plates, and whose seats on Sabbath day groaned beneath the weight of respectability, broadcloth and satin.
He came and said his prayer—decorously and in measured words—but never once did the dying man release his hold on the dollar.
“Can't you read me something, say—quick, don't you see I'm going?” at length said the rich man, turning a frightened look toward the preacher.
The preacher, whose cravat was of the whitest, took a book with golden clasps from a marble table. And he read:
“And I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.”
“Who said those words—who—who—who?” fairly shrieked the dying man, shaking the hand that clenched the dollar, at the preacher's head.
The preacher hastily turned over the leaf and did not reply.
“Why did you never tell me of this before? Why did you never preach from it as I sat in your church? Why—why?”
The preacher did not reply, but turned over another leaf. But the dying man would not be quieted.
“And it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, is it? Then what's to become of me? Am I not rich? What tenant did I ever spare, what debtor did I ever spare, what debtor did I ever release? And you stood up Sunday after Sunday and preached to us, and never said one word about the camel. Not a word about the camel.”
The preacher, in search of a consoling passage, turned rapidly over the leaves, and, in his confusion, came to this passage, which he read:
“Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. . . . Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.”
“And you never preached that to me!” shrieked the dying man.
The preacher, who had blundered through the passage from James, which we have quoted, knew not what to say. He was perchance terrified by the very look of the dying parishioner.
Then the wife drew near and strove to comfort him, and the son (who had been reading the will) attempted a word or two of consolation.
But with the dollar in his hand, he sank into death, talking of stock, of rent, of copper mines and camels, of tenant and debtor, until life left his lips.
Thus he died.
When he was cold, the preacher rose and asked the lawyer whether the deceased had left anything to such and such charitable society, which had been engrafted upon the preacher's church.
And the wife closed his eyes, and tried to wrench the dollar from his hand, but in vain. He clutched it as though it were the only saviour to light him through the darkness of eternity.
And the son sat down with dry eyes, and thought of the hundreds of thousands which were now his own.
Next day there was a hearse followed by a train of carriages nearly a mile in length. There was a crowd around an open grave, and an elegant sermon upon the virtues of the deceased by the preacher. There was a fluttering of crape badges, and rolling of carriages, but no tears.
They left the dead man and returned to the palace, where sorrow died, even as the crape was taken from the door knob.
And, in the grave, the dead hand still clenched the dollar!—Geo. Lippard.