p. 531 | USELESS TREASURE

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 1, 1881

USELESS TREASURE.

A RICH nobleman was once showing a friend a great collection of precious stones whose value was almost beyond counting. There were diamonds, and pearls, and rubies, and gems from almost every country, which had been gathered by their possessor with the greatest labor and expense. "And yet," he remarked, "they yield me no income." His friend replied that he had two stones which cost him about ten florins each, yet they yielded him an income of two hundred florins a year.

In much surprise the nobleman desired to see the wonderful stones, when the man led him to his mill, and pointed to the two toiling, gray millstones. They were laboriously crushing the grain into snowy flour for the use of hundreds who depended on this work for their daily bread. Those two dull, homely stones did more good in the world, and yielded a larger income, than all the nobleman's jewels.

So it is with idle treasure everywhere. It is doing nobody any good. It is right to be prudent and saving of our money when it is for a good, fixed purpose, but to hoard it up for its own sake is more than a folly—it is a sin.