p. 159 | The Last of Earth

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 18, 1875

The Last of Earth.

The Paris correspondent of the Traveler has the following:—

“Never envy any man! All have their burdens; and He ‘who tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb,’ has endowed habit with the power of alleviating the heaviest loads. The other day there was a funeral in this street, a few doors below the home in which I live. All the hideous pageantry which increases the horrors of death was assembled. The crowd was numerous. The luxurious mansion of the great banker was one great funeral chamber. The banker is worth a million of dollars. His average income is a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. He is the head of a joint stock company, which enables him to dispose of ten millions of dollars at his pleasure. He is one of the lions on ‘Change.’ Do you not envy him? Oh! no; do not envy him; he has his sorrows as well as anybody; for only six months ago the undertakers laid his third son, then nineteen, in the grave. The other day his second son was carried away by the somber tradesman to the graveyard, though the boy was but twenty-one. His eldest daughter is a hunchback, and is in declining health. His second daughter is bed-ridden with consumption, and will surprise the doctors if she outlives the winter. The banker himself is blind from over-labor. He has been known to pass twenty days without undressing or sleeping in a bed; all his repose being a few hours of feverish slumber snatched from corroding cares, a respite passed on a sofa! Oh! do not envy the rich banker, though his coffers overflow with gold; for it avails little to him; and though, as I grant ye, the resonant chimes of coin tossed about as so much trash in his cash office, sounds musical to the ear, yet the oft-heard passing bell and doctor’s tread, common in that house as the resonance of gold, destroy all the effects, except the painful contrast between that and the emptiness of human vanity and ambition. So, envy no man!”