A Shilling Heart | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 18, 1883

A Shilling Heart.

It is rare that the growth of one's benevolence keeps pace with the growth of one's means. When persons are absorbed with thoughts of gaining, keeping, or enjoying wealth, they lose their inclination for giving, and grow narrow, sordid and selfish. A widow with a very small income was remarkable for the liberality of her gifts to religious objects. She at length became heir to a large property, and it was noticed that her contributions began to fall off. Her offerings were smaller in amount than when she was poor, and grew less; now she only gave when she was asked to give, and then she gave next to nothing at all. Once when applied to by her pastor to help a cause to which, in humble circumstance, she had always contributed a guinea, she presented only a shilling, and the good minister could not help calling attention to the change that had come over her.

"Ah!" she said, " when day by day I looked to God for my bread, I had enough and to spare; now I have to look to my ample income, and I am all the time haunted with the fear of losing it and coming to want. I had the guinea heart when I had the shilling means; now I have the guiena means and the shilling heart."