Thomas Dick puts the hoarding of wealth in this striking way: Suppose a man could lay up a stock of clothes and provisions sufficient to last him for three hundred years, what would it avail him since he can live, at most, but seventy or one hundred years? Suppose he had laid up in a storehouse seventy thousand pairs of shoes, to what end would it serve if he could make use, during his whole life, of only the one-hundredth part of them? He would be in the same condition as a man who had one hundred dishes placed before him at dinner, but he could only partake of one; how ridiculous it would appear if all that could be said of a man, while he lived, was simply this: That his whole life was occupied in collecting and laying up in a storehouse sixty thousand mahogany chairs which were never intended to be used for the furniture of apartments, or eighty thousand pairs of trousers which were never intended to be worn. And where is the difference, in point of rationality and utility, between such absurd practices, and hoarding thousands of guineas and bank notes, which are never brought forth for the benefit of mankind. There is no conduct connected with the pursuits of human beings, that appears more absurd and wicked than such practices (however common), if examined by the dictates of reason and the word of God.