“There are many evils which fall upon man’s declining years.”
“Judge me if my philosophy is faulty. I see ever that the fear of being left poor and also old here haunts most lives. This fear is the parent of avarice, and avarice is a serpent of glowing head and deadly sting. It robs society and individuals of the two choicest jewels, plenteous benevolence and serene hopefulness. You will find that most of the wrongs from man to man arise from hearts made cruel by the rigors of avariciousness. If we could stay that master passion, all streams of benevolence would rise to their flood, and hoarding, now a seeming necessity, most frequently a curse, become the occupation solely of a few monomaniacs.”
“Miriamne’s philosophy is as invulnerable as a knight’s hauberk, but how can you make it a general practice?”
“Oh, very easily. I’ve planned to endow our Temple of Allegory so that it may not only teach but also do beautiful things. I’d have it a Pool of Bethesda, stirred continuously to meet every human need.”
“Miriamne will have a vast following; the masses believe in loaves and fishes!”
“True, avarice prompts some to a mean faith, but I seek to slay avarice and blast the love of money, that root of all evil.”
“‘Enthusiast!’ a gainsaying world will cry.”
“And the cry of the world will be then, as often before, a burning lie! So be it. I’m holding up the truth, the royal truth of Christianity. I’ll hold it up while I have breath, and leave that truth, if God gives me grace, as the beacon light on our hill to glow until all Christendom puts on a charity as multiform and broad as the needs of humanity.”
“But there is a large and needy world.”
“I have a rich Father; the earth is His and the fullness thereof. The only difficulty is in securing from His stewards an accounting and a beginning of payment.”