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Ten million dollars, a hundred millions, would not purchase a place in it! Did you ever hear the parable of the camel and the needle's eye? The price of a ticket here is an irreproachable record!" With these astonishing words Cosmo turned his back upon his visitor and shut the door in his face. The billionaire staggered back, rubbed his head, and then went off muttering: "An idiot! A plain idiot!
In the XVIIth century Italy was famous for its punto tagliato or cut work. John Taylor mentions "rare Italian cutworke" in "The Praise of the Needle." This poem may perhaps be of interest to some; it was prefixed to a book of embroidery patterns of cut work named "The Needle's Excellency."
It implies that there is not on your whole frame a spot the size of a needle's point, which has not its own little canal filled with blood; for if there were such a one, there at any rate the needle would pass in without tearing the canal, and causing the blood to flow out.
The archdeacon himself was a rich man, so powerful that he could afford to look down upon a bishop; and Mrs Grantly, though there was left about her something of an old softness of nature, a touch of the former life which had been hers before the stream of her days had run gold, yet she, too, had taken kindly to wealth and high standing, and was by no means one of those who construe literally that passage of scripture which tells us of the camel and the needle's eye.
"It is as hard to come as for a camel To thread the postern of a needle's eye;" showing that either the imagination of Shakspere suggested the real explanation, or he had taken pains to acquaint himself with the significance of the simile.
Here, then, is the pitiful fix of the rich man; here is that needle's eye in which he stuck already in the days of Christ, and still sticks to-day, firmer, if possible, than ever: that he has the money and lacks the love which should make his money acceptable.
What! a class that is to be in want from no fault of its own, and yet greedily eager to receive from strangers; and to be quite respectable, and at the same time quite devoid of self-respect; and play the most delicate part of friendship, and yet never be seen; and wear the form of man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature: and all this, in the hope of getting a belly-god Burgess through a needle's eye!
If you scrawl all over the face with which the coarse finger of the potter has decorated a water-jar, the injury to the wretched pot is but small, but if you scratch, only with a needle's point, that gem with the portraits of Ptolemy and Arsinoe, which clasps Cleopatra's robe round her fair throat, the richest queen will grieve as though she had suffered some serious loss.
Suddenly he sprang up and burst out in a bitter tirade upon the popular and even the judicial prejudice against his own beneficent calling. No money-lender would ever get justice in a British court of law; easier for the camel to thread the needle's eye. That flagrant forgery would be accepted at sight by our vaunted British jury. The only chance was to abstract it before the case came on.
Here, then, is the pitiful fix of the rich man; here is that needle's eye in which he stuck already in the days of Christ, and still sticks to-day, firmer, if possible, than ever: that he has the money and lacks the love which should make his money acceptable.
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