Mr. Million Dollars

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 4, 1864

Mr. Million Dollars.

THE following from the address of Henry Ward Beecher, at the recent meeting of the Tract Society in Boston, is characteristic and pertinent:

A man may make a million dollars and be—a man. For a man who has got a million dollars, you know is a man—in New York, I suppose, in Boston. Everybody takes his hat off to Mr. Million Dollars. He is conciliated, he is respected; and if there is any prospect that dew will be shaken off his branches, he is invited everywhere. If a man has a million dollars he is a man; but he dies, and his million dollars is cut into pieces, and persons carry it off their several ways. Mr. Million Dollars after an appropriate funeral, is buried, and there lies; and in a few years nobody talks about him, nobody thinks about him, nobody hears about him. In fifty years the shrewdest man might go and read his grave stone and find "Mr. Million Dollars." "Who was he and where is his money?" And it would puzzle an antiquary to tell what those heirs did do with it. It puzzled them after a few years to tell where it had gone to. He made his money; it gave him power and influence; he distributed it among his heirs, yea, he distributed it, and they squandered it; he died and went to dust, and that was the last of him, so far as this world is concerned; I don't know what became of him beyond.

But suppose that instead of that he had made himself his own executor, and had put fifty thousand dollars behind a printing-press and said "As long as interest lasts on that fifty thousand dollars, work, press, work!" Suppose he had taken some treatise written for liberty, based upon the Bible, and carrying out the vital power of the Gospel, and had taken another fifty thousand dollars and put it into the hands of the Tract Society saying, "I consecrate to the printing of that book this fifty thousand dollars; work with that money as long as it can bear interest." Suppose he had taken five hundred thousand dollars and appointed them his sentinels—stationing fifty thousand dollars there, and there, and there—they would go on working until the last trump sounds; and when a hundred years had passed over his grave, his name through that society, would still be fresh, and his influence still be potent for good. Every tract would bear his name upon its imprint, and a million tombstones could not make it so illustrious.