Chapter 9　Tiny Treasures

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

-Matthew 6：21

I once read a description of a group of sculptured figures that had been made for a public building. The chief thing the newspaper said about the sculpture was that it weighed ten tons.It did not say whether the statues were beautiful or not-just that they weighed ten tons.It might have been ten tons of coal.But mere size doesn't make a thing beautiful.The Greeks made some huge statues and they were beautiful.They also made tiny sculptured figures so small that you have to look at them under a magnifying glass to see how beautiful they are.

Once in a museum I saw a piece of such sculpture. It couldn't have weighed more than an ounce and was no larger than a domino.It was a piece of colored stone through which the light shone and beautiful figures of Greek gods and goddesses were carved into it in low relief.The figures had been cut into the stone with very fine but sharp tools.It had been made by some Greek sculptor whose name no one knows.It was called a gem, the name we give to anything that is very precious although it may be tiny.

The British Museum in London has a whole room of such gems made by sculptors as