How the Talents Were Doubled.
By Independent
He was a "good and faithful servant;" he doubled the talents given him; he was rewarded accordingly; that is about all the story tells the ordinary reader. But there is a little intimation how he managed to double them. He "went and traded with the same." He turned them over, and made them a source of profit. Just how he traded is not told in the parable; but if it was in the line of the best trading nowadays, it was by quick sales and small profits. If he had gone into the market-place with his ten talents, and waited for a chance to make his hundred per cent. all at once, he would probably have waited till his lord came back and asked for an accounting; and he would have had no more to show for his stewardship than the unfaithful servant who hid his lord's money. At the end of the first week he had made very little profit; but he was glad to get that little; and he was able to make a little more the next week; and more still the next, until, when his lord came home, the accumulated profit had218doubled the original capital. Half a per cent. profit is a very little; but half per cent. a week is [at simple interest] twenty-six per cent. a year; and the lord of that servant might have come back in scarcely more than three years and found his capital doubled, and all done in insignificant little profits. Is not this very much the way it is in Christian service? Men often think they will not do anything for Christ until they can do something noticeable and handsome. They want their talents to bring in a big profit on each transaction. But those big opportunities happen very seldom. Every week and every day there are little opportunities—chances for a word, a smile, a cup of cold water. Each of these is an investment for the Master, not at a large profit, but at a satisfactory one; and when the Lord cometh, the grand total of profit we can hand in to him as our account will be made up of these little half-per-cent. transactions, which count up in the end more than the large ones. It is on these that we get compound interest. It is these that show the good Christian financier, who took his talents and traded every day with the same, accepting every opportunity to make a little, and thus gained the "Well done." It is the man who does common duties every day to the best of his powers, neglecting no smallest occasions, that gives the world the example of a living Christian character, and secures a larger harvest of blessing than many an ambitious and noisy professor of religion.—Independent.