ce wherewith to compare it, he may dispose of it for a tenth of
its value. If the best diamond that the seller had ever seen were worth
twenty thousand pounds, he might value this one at forty thousand; and
that price the buyer might cheerfully pay down, although it constituted
all his property, knowing that at home the prize will command four
hundred thousand. Thus, without supposing ignorance on the one side or
dishonesty on the other, you have a transaction which will enrich the
merchant at once and enable him to retire in affluence. This is the sort
of transaction that is supposed in the parable. It was a natural and
probable supposition at a time when information did not spread so
quickly as in our time, and when pearls held as to value the place which
diamonds occupy in modern merchandise.

It is true that the merchant went abroad expressly for the purpose of
seeking goodly pearls; yet this pearl was to him an unexpected and
surprising discovery. He had provided funds sufficient to purchase many
pearls; but when he met with this one, its value was such that he could
not make an offer for it until he had returned to his home and converted
all his property, including the pearls that he had previously purchased,
into money. In this parable as well as in that of the hidden treasure,
an object is discovered of a value hitherto unknown and unsuspected. But
the lesson here is in one important respect different from that of the
preceding parable, and the point of distinction is, that there a man
stumbled upon a treasure when he was in search of meaner things, while
here the merchant finds in kind the very object which he sought, but
finds it in measure far surpassing all his expectation or desire.

Well might the merchant return and convert all his estate into money
that he might purchase this jewel; for if it were once in his
possession, as there could be no rival, he might command his own price.
None but monarchs could aspire to the possession of such a treasure, and
these would compete with each other at his desk for a gem that could not
elsewhere be obtained.[24]

[24] Although their place is not the highest now, yet pearls even in
our own day are sometimes found of a value so great that the history
of an individual is recorded and its praises published through the
world. The following, for example, are the terms of a paragraph
taken from a British journal of last year:--"One of the finest
pearls in the