Mark 10:23-27 And Jesus looked round about, and said to his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!… Two men have recently passed away, whose history, as one turns from their graves to sum it up, is at once a poem and a benediction. They were both men of large wealth and of inherited culture. They were both men with an intense love of life, and most human enjoyment of its pleasures. There have not lived in our generation two men who were more thoroughly alive, to their very finger ends, or who were more conspicuously exposed to the manifold dangers of the possession of great wealth. And yet who, in thinking of them, ever thought of their money? And when they died the other day, bereaving the two chief cities of our land with a sense of personal loss, who asked concerning either of them so beggarly a question as, "What did he leave?" What did they leave? They left each of them the fragrance of a good name, which is as ointment poured out. They left their image stamped in the hearts of thousands of men, women, and children, whose lives they had brightened and ennobled and blessed. Above all, they left a lesson to you and me of what men can be and do who say to wealth and the world, "You are my servant, not my master! I will not be slothful in business; I will be fervent in spirit, but it shall be always 'serving the Lord.'" They have taught two great communities that it is possible to be rich and not selfish, to have wealth and not be enslaved by it, to use the world as not abusing it. And today, William Welsh, in the Indian wigwam in Niobrara, among the boys of Girard College with whom he spent a part of every Sunday of his life, in the homes of the working men of Frankford whom he taught to love him as brother man; — and Theodore Roosevelt in the newsboy's lodging house, in the cripple's hospital, in the heart of the little Italian flower girl who brought her offering of grateful love to his door the day he died, have left behind them monuments the like of which mere wealth could never rear, and the proudest achievements of human genius never hope to win. They will be remembered when the men of great fortune who have filled the brief hour with the fame of their millions shall have vanished into merited oblivion. They may have been poorer than these, but the world is richer because they were in it, and the influence of their large-hearted and unselfish lives will be owned and honoured when the mere hoarders of the day have ceased to have any slightest interest or influence among men, save as subjects of the somewhat curious and somewhat contemptuous study of the moral anatomist. (Bishop H. C. Potter.) Parallel Verses KJV: And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! |
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