Educated and Rich Fools
Listen to me, you who say “To-day or to-morrow we will go to such and such a town, spend a year there, and trade, and make money,” and yet you do not know what your life will be like to-morrow! For you are but a mist appearing for a little while and then disappearing. You ought, rather, to say “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.” But, ah it is, you are constantly boasting presumptuously! All such boasting is wicked. He, then, who knows what is right but fails to do it—that is sin in him.
Listen to me, you rich men, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming upon you! Your riches have wasted away, and your clothes have become moth-eaten. Your gold and silver are rusted; and the rust on them shall be evidence against you, and shall eat into your very flesh. It was fire, so to speak, that you stored up for yourselves in these last days. I tell you, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you have been fraudulently keeping back, are crying out against you, and the outcries of your reapers have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts! You have lived on earth a life of extravagance and luxury; you have indulged your fancies in a time of bloodshed. You have condemned, you have murdered, the Righteous One! Must not God be opposed to you?
—James, a Brother of Jesus.
Life’s Record
Life is a sheet of paper white
Whereon each one of us may write
His word or two, and then comes night.
Greatly begin! though thou hast time
But for a line, be that sublime.
Not failure, but low aim is crime.
—James Russell Lowell.
He who raises a hand against a fellow-man, even if he injure him not, is wicked.
—The Talmud.