A farmer in one of the retired mountain towns of Massachusetts, began business in 1818, with six hundred dollars in debt.  He began with the determination to pay the debt in six years, in equal installments, and to give all his net income if any remained above those installments.  The income of the first year, however, was expended in purchasing stock and other necessaries for his farm.

In the six next years he paid off the debt, and having abandoned the intention of ever being any richer, he has ever since given his entire income, after supporting his family and thoroughly educating his six children.

During all this period he has lived with the strictest economy, and everything pertaining to his house, table, dress and equipage has been in the most simple style; and though he has twice been a member of the State Senate, he conscientiously retains this simplicity in his mode of life.  The farm is rocky and remote from the village, and his whole property, real and personal, would not exceed in value three thousand dollars.  Yet sometimes he has been enabled to give from $200 to $300 a year.

EXPERIENCE OF A SADDLER.

Normand Smith, a saddler of Hartford, Conn., after practicing for years an elevated system of benevolence, bequeathed in charity the sum of $30,000.

An anonymous writer says of himself, that he commenced business and prosecuted it in the usual way till he lost $900, which was all he was worth, and found himself in debt $1,100.

Being led by his trials to take God’s word as his guide in business as well as in heart and religion, he determined to give his earnings liberally unto the Lord.

The first year he gave $12.  For eighteen years the amount increased by about 25 per cent., and the last year he gave $850, and he says he did it easier than during the first year he paid the $12.  Besides, though with nothing but his hands to depend on when he began this course, he paid the whole debt of $1,100 with interest, though it took him nine years to do it.

JACOB NOT BLESSED UNTIL HE BECAME A LIBERAL GIVER.

Jacob went out from his father’s house “with his staff,” a poor man.  But at Bethel he vowed to give to God the tenth of all that God should bestow on him.  Commencing thus, God blessed him, and in twenty years he returned with great riches.

THE LORD’S INSURANCE MONEY.

A tradesman in New York had pledged to give to the Lord a certain portion of his business receipts as fast as they were collected.  He called this The Lord’s insurance money, for, said he, “so long as I give so long will the Lord help me and bless me, and in some way he will give me the means to give, so it is no money lost.  Rather it is a blessing to my heart to keep it open in gratitude, a blessing to dispose of it to gladden other hearts, and the surest way to keep the Lord’s favor with me.”