V
ALEXANDER AT THE GATES OF PARADISE
ALEXANDER the Great, in his travels in the East, one day wandered to the gate of Paradise. He knocked, and the guardian angel asked, ‘Who is there?’ ‘Alexander,’ was the answer. ‘Who is Alexander?’ ‘Alexander, you know—the Alexander—Alexander the Great—Conqueror of the world.’ ‘We know him not—he cannot enter here. This is the Lord’s gate; only the righteous enter.’ Alexander then more humbly begged for something to show he had reached the heavenly gate, and a small fragment of a human skull was thrown to him, with the words, ‘Weigh it’. He took it away, and showed it contemptuously to his Wise Men, who brought a pair of scales, and, placing the bone in one, Alexander put some of his silver and gold against it in the other; but the small bone outweighed them all. More and more silver and gold were put into the scale, and at last all his crown jewels and diadems were in; but they all flew upwards like feathers before the weight of the bone, till one of the Wise Men placed a few grains of dust on the bone. Up flew the scale! The bone was that which surrounded the eye, and nothing will ever satisfy the eye until covered by the dust of the grave.
VI
HEAVENLY TREASURES
KING MONOBAZ, who in the days of the Second Temple became a proselyte to Judaism, unlocked his ancestral treasures at a time of famine, and distributed them among the poor. His ministers rebuked him, saying, ‘Thy fathers amassed, thou dost squander’. ‘Nay,’ said the benevolent king, ‘they preserved earthly, but I heavenly, treasures; theirs could be stolen, mine are beyond mortal reach; theirs were barren, mine will bear fruit time without end; they preserved money, I have preserved lives. The treasures which my fathers laid by are for this world, mine are for eternity.’