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Is it the ambition of your life to accumulate great wealth, and thus to acquire a great name, and along with it happiness and satisfaction?  Then remember that whether these will come to you will depend entirely upon the use and disposition you make of your wealth.  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.  There is not such a great difference, if you will think of it carefully,—­one a pile of old iron, the other a pile of gold or silver, but all belonging to the same general class.

It is a great law of our being that we become like those things we contemplate.  If we contemplate those that are true and noble and elevating, we grow in the likeness of these.  If we contemplate merely material things, as gold or silver or copper or iron, our souls, our natures, and even our faces become like them, hard and flinty, robbed of their finer and better and grander qualities.  Call to mind the person or picture of the miser, and you will quickly see that this is true.  Merely nature’s great law.  He thought he was going to be a master:  he finds himself the slave.  Instead of possessing his wealth, his wealth possesses him.  How often have I seen persons of nearly or quite this kind!  Some can be found almost anywhere.  You can call to mind a few, perhaps many.