The Rich Man and Lazarus

There was a miser, a man whose heart was as closed and hard as stone, who had accumulated through decades of careful hoarding a vast fortune in gold coins. He kept this treasure locked within an iron chest in a chamber of his house, guarded day and night with the jealousy of a dragon protecting its hoard. Though the miser was wealthy beyond measure, he would not spend a single coin on comfort or sustenance. He ate the poorest food, wore the most threadbare garments, and lived in conditions of deliberate deprivation, all to preserve his gold. He never gave to the poor, never helped the afflicted, never spent a single coin on anything that did not contribute directly to his comfort in the most minimal sense. The miser's only pleasure was to open his iron chest and gaze upon his gold, counting it repeatedly, running his fingers across the coins, and contemplating the power his wealth represented. Yet this gold could not be spent without diminishing it, and so it remained locked away, untouched and unused, a treasure that brought him neither happiness nor satisfaction. Years passed, and the miser grew old and weak. He was visited by relatives who sought his companionship and inheritance, but they soon abandoned him when they realized that no amount of pleasant behavior would convince him to share even the smallest portion of his wealth during his lifetime. His solitude was absolute. When at last the miser died, his fortune passed to a distant heir who had never even met him, a man who had no love for the old miser and who spent the money with reckless abandon, squandering in a few years what had taken the miser a lifetime to accumulate. Thus did the miser's generosity—or rather, his absolute lack of it—result in the complete loss of any benefit the wealth might have provided, either to himself or to anyone he might have chosen to help.