A POOR man who supported his family by daily labor used to deal with the two storekeepers of his native village. Of one he bought flour and meat; of the other, materials for his own and his children’s clothing. Being a good workman and honest as well as industrious, he was accustomed to settle his accounts at both stores every Saturday night.

All went on well and to the satisfaction of both buyer and seller as long as health lasted. But at length sickness came, and Saturday brought the laborer no wages. Still, he hoped for the return of strength by another week, and then to be at work again. But strength did not return. Week after week passed, and it seemed farther away than ever. The storekeepers’ accounts remained unsettled. The matter was becoming a serious one for them. What should they do?

At this point one of them opened his ledger, went over every item set down there, and, after footing up the total amount, calculated the interest on it to the last cent. Then he sat thinking about what he could do with the money if he only had it in hand; and this was the standpoint from which he looked at the debt.

The other storekeeper also went over his ledger and footed up the amount. But after doing so he shut the book up again, and, putting on his hat, went to see the man who owed him the money. Entering his humble cottage, he sat down at his bedside and looked into his honest, suffering face, and on his wife and children in poverty around him; and here was the standpoint from which this storekeeper looked at the debt.

The sick man died, and his family was left penniless. The storekeeper who had visited him, still looking at the debt, as it were, from the lowly bedside, thought it was right to cross it off his books and forgive it altogether. The other storekeeper, viewing it from his counting-room[113]
[114] only, thought it right to get the money if he could. Had he not furnished all the articles that were charged for? Had not the man’s family taken them and used them? The money was his, and he meant to have it. So he held the dead man’s wife and children responsible, and, though they had a hard time to earn their daily bread, he made it harder by demanding something each month till the last cent was paid.

Time rolled on, and the years that gather, an ever-increasing load, upon poor and rich alike, began to bow the forms of the two storekeepers. Old age overtook them, and finally the hour when each in turn must leave store and ledger to know them no more. Then it was found that he who had remitted the poor man’s debt had left to his family a moderate competency, with a good many accounts in his ledger balanced by the one word written over against them, “Forgiven.”

The other storekeeper had left his family rich, with scarcely an account that had ever been due him unpaid, and the few that were, remained so only because neither force nor persuasion could bring the money. But in the village where they had lived and died it was noticed, long after both storekeepers and their ways of doing business were forgotten, that the smaller inheritance increased in the hands of those who received it, while[115]
[116] the larger one, in the hands receiving it, seemed mysteriously to melt away.

According to the standpoint from which we look at a thing will be our views of right and wrong respecting it; but we are accountable for the choice of that standpoint.