$1,900 Refused.
We have all read the standard story of the man who for a wager stood on London Bridge all day, and tried to give away a tray full of gold sovereigns, assuring everyone of their genuineness. He had succeeded, by nightfall, in persuading only two persons to accept the coins, and they took them for playthings for their children.
We are all abnormally suspicious. We have our reasons, based upon sad experience; but the reasons sometimes—often, indeed—do not apply.
Once in the Waldorf-Astoria, New York City, a Westerner approached the sophisticated cashier of the restaurant and offered to pay a $14 luncheon check with a gold brick.
It was a genuine gold brick, worth $1,900, but the cashier indignantly refused it, and promptly summoned the hotel detective.
That officer soon learned that the "green-goods" stranger was a wealthy miner, whose millionaire friends had "stumped" him to sell that "brick" in New York at any mice.
The lesson is a plain one. It reaches far beyond the warning not to be over-suspicious For here is the greatest of all wealth, the riches beyond mice, that for which some day we shall be glad to barter everything else, if we have it not,—the salvation of our souls.
And Christ offers to give it to us. Nay, He presses it upon us. And how many millions are contemptuously refusing it!
Is not this, after all, the world's supreme folly?