Page:The stuff of manhood (1917).djvu/172

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him the nominal headship with his former salary, but really transferred all the power to other men. It was the chance of a lifetime for the older man. He had his strength and his time for any service or ministry or pleasure he might choose. But the only meat which he had to eat was the management of the business, and accordingly he starved to death in a fine home and with a large salary. All that the bag of his body needed he had, but man cannot live by bread alone without a word from God. The Tinker of Bedford Jail heard the key turn in the lock behind him. And did he famish alone? He opened the gate of his house within and out they came—Christian and Great-Heart and Hopeful and Evangelist and Mercy and Dare-to-Die—and the loneliness of John Bunyan's cell became the greatest society on earth, and the immortals who marched out of the wealth of his soul are the companions of millions who could not name one human being who was Bunyan's contemporary. The rich men who have transmitted real wealth have been the lovers, the dreamers, the servers who ate bread at God's hands and who knew and taught men that the life is more than meat and the body than raiment. "She was not daily bread," wrote her niece of Emily Dickinson. "She was star dust."

This above all was characteristic of Christ. Part of our Lord's preëminence of nature and of achievement was the untold wealth of His inward