The last degree of poverty is to be a pauper. Now, the simple truth is
that we are all--every last man of us--paupers in everything. We haven't a
thing we haven't got from some one else. We are beneficiaries to the last
degree, dependent on the bounty of Another. We are paupers in life itself.
Our life came to us in the first instance from the creative Hand, through
the action of others, and it is being sustained every moment by the same
Hand. We had nothing to do with its coming, and, while we influence our
life by living in accord with certain physical laws, still the life itself
is all the time being supplied to us directly by the same unseen Hand.

We are paupers in ability, in virtue, in character, in fact in everything.
We own nothing; we only hold it in trust. We have nothing except what some
One else is supplying. What we call our ability, our genius, and so on,
comes by the creative breath breathing afresh upon and through what the
patient creative Hand has supplied and is sustaining. We are paupers,
without a rag to our bones, or a copper in the pocket we haven't got, not
having a rag to our bones; paupers in everything except----.

There is an exception. It is both pitiable and laughable. We are
enormously rich in _spirit_, in our imagination, in our thought of
ourselves. Blessed are they who are as poor in spirit as they actually are
in everything else. They recognize that they are wholly dependent on some
One else, and so they live the dependent life, with its blessed closeness
of touch with the gracious Provider. In certain institutions are placed
those who imagine themselves to be in high social and official rank, and
in possessions what they are not, who imagine it to such a degree that it
is best that they be kept apart from others. It would seem like an extreme
thing to say that these people are spirit-mirrors in which we may partly
see ourselves. Yet it would be saying the truth. How laughable, if it were