In 1888, a man picked up the morning paper and, to his horror, read his own obituary! The newspaper, reporting the death of the man’s brother, had misidentified him as the man himself!
Like most of us, the surviving brother relished the idea of finding out what people would say about him after he died. He read past the bold caption, “Dynamite King Dies,” to the text itself. He read along until he was taken aback by the description of himself as a “Merchant of Death.”
He was the inventor of dynamite and had amassed a great fortune from the manufacture of weapons of destruction among many other things. But he was moved by this description. Did he really want to be known as a “Merchant of Death”?
It was, perhaps, at that moment that a healing power greater than the destructive force of dynamite came over him and prompted him to establish in his will a series of prizes honoring those who contributed to the world works of peace and human betterment. — Today, of course, the man is best remembered, not as a “Merchant of Death,” but as the founder of the Nobel Peace Prize – Alfred Nobel.
Submitted by Fr. Joseph Dovari