If you regard it
as a _private trust_ to be used for the highest good of mankind, then
well and good, these will come to you. If your object, however, is to
pile it up, to hoard it, then neither will come; and you will find it a
life as unsatisfactory as one can live.
There is, there can be, no greatness in things, in material things, of
themselves. The greatness is determined entirely by the use and
disposition made of them. The greatest greatness and the only _true_
greatness in the world is unselfish love and service and self-devotion
to one's fellow-men.
Look at the matter carefully, and tell me candidly if there can be
anything more foolish than a man's spending all the days of his life
piling up and hoarding money, too mean and too stingy to use any but
what is absolutely necessary, accumulating many times more than he can
possibly ever use, always eager for more, growing still more eager and
grasping the nearer he comes to life's end, then lying down, dying, and
leaving it. It seems to me about as sensible for a man to have as the
great aim and ambition of life the piling up of an immense pile of old
iron in the middle of a large field, and sitting on it day after day
because he is so wedded to it that it has become a part of his life and
lest a fragment disappear, denying himself and those around him many of
the things that go to make life valuable and pleasant, and finally dying
there, himself, the soul, so dwarfed and so stunted that he has really a
hard time to make his way out of the miserable old body.
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