Sacred Money
In looking over the papers of my beloved and departed mother — who died at the age of eighty-five — I discovered the account-book which contained the expenses of my early boyhood. If it requires financial ability to manage a large estate, it requires still more to eke out a scanty income and make both ends meet. In the list of frugal expenditures made by that widowed mother for an only boy there stood recorded on almost every page the words, Sacred money.” This was sometimes bestowed in making him a life member of the American Tract Society, or the Home Missionary Society, or some other Christian organization. There was also a stout, large envelope which bore the same label, “Sacred money.” Into that envelope the good 134 woman was wont to put a certain portion of her very limited income as soon as it came into her hands. When the money was once placed in that wallet the Lord was sure to get His own. Come what might, no demand of luxury or of necessity was allowed to “rob God” of what had been consecrated to His service.
My only apology for this peep of the public eye into a bit of private history is that it reveals the only sure and successful method of practising systematic beneficence. It fulfils the apostolic rule of ‘’laying by in store” a fixed sum for Christian charity, and then gives conscience the key. To touch a dime of that money for any mere secular use would have been in that godly matron’s eyes as egregious a theft as the picking of a neighbor’s pocket. That lesson in systematic beneficence has lasted me all my life, and I most earnestly commend it to every Christian parent. Every child should be reared with the firm persuasion that if he gives his heart to Christ, he at the same time gives to Him not only his influence, I3S but a certain reasonable share of his substance. If God’s day is held sacred, and God’s house is sacred, so should the money that fairly belongs to Him be held sacred likewise. There is no haphazard about this method. The money thus put away and labelled is to be out of the reach of selfishness, and religiously parcelled off for the various objects of benevolence as good judgment directs.
If this system were adopted and practiced in every Christian family, what a revolution it would work! Giving would be regarded as an act of divine worship; the money thus consecrated in advance would be an element in the Sabbath service, and the pastor might fittingly (as some pastors now do) come down from his pulpit and invoke a special blessing on the offerings thus presented cheerfully to the Lord. This system thoroughly carried out would make the contributions of each church not a widely fluctuating, but a fixed and reliable sum from year to year. The great institutions of benevolence could fairly determine their 136 outlay, because they would know their probable income. The curse and stigma of debt would be avoided. The secretaries and directors of our Christian schemes would no longer be kept awake at night by the terrible spectre of ^’deficiency.” The Lord would get His own and the Church would get the blessing, if in every Christian house there was a box or a receptacle that bore the inscription “Sacred money.”
In many families the sum thus consecrated might be very small. But gifts to the Lord are to be weighed rather than counted. The two mites of the ‘’poor widow” outweighed the shekels of gold or silver cast by jewelled fingers in’to the Lord’s treasury. The drops make the rivulets, and the rivulets fill the broad lakes. Nine-tenths of all the money that drives the financial machinery of Christ’s Church comes from humble stewards, whose “sacred money” is reckoned by dollars and not by hundreds or thousands.
Sometimes small donations yield large results. This reminds me of a pretty inci- 137 dent that I may venture to relate, since it is not likely to meet the eye of the person referred to. When my Brooklyn church, in the days of its infancy, were building their present sanctuary they ran ashore for funds. The Civil War had just broken out, and almost every new church enterprise came to a standstill. On a certain Sabbath I made a fervent appeal for help, and a visitor from New York heard the appeal and went home and spoke of it at his boarding-house table. At the table was a bright young lady who taught in a school and sustained her widowed mother out of her small salary. I had once rendered the young lady some trifling service, which I had quite forgotten, but she had not. The next day she came over to Brooklyn and told me how badly she felt that my church was in such straits. She was not a Christian and had never given anything to any religious object, but she felt desirous to contribute “her mite,” and slipped into my hand a bit of paper containing some coin, which I put into my pocket with a word of sincere thanks. 138
After she had gone I opened the paper and found that it contained a fifty-dollar California gold-piece! 1 immediately sent her word that she must take it back, for I knew that she could not afford to give such a sum. But she wrote me that this, her first gift, had already afforded her such delight she would never allow it to be returned. The next Sabbath I told the story of the gold-piece, and it fired the congregation with fresh enthusiasm and brought in such contributions of funds as tided us over into deeper waters. The young lady herself determined to follow up her gift by coming over to our chapel every Sabbath, and was soon converted, and became a happy member of Christ’s flock.
The orphan girl married a young man of fine promise, and they are prominent members of a church in C — . Their two children are winning high honors at college. Verily that orphan girl’s gold-piece was “sacred money,” and it yielded a grand “dividend.” I have told the story of that coin in more than one place where money 139 was being raised under difficulties, and I should not wonder if it were to go on and accumulate still more at compound interest. The Lord’s treasury is a wonderful institution; it makes mites turn to millions, it pays magnificent dividends in this world, and its “sacred money” becomes precious treasure in heaven.