There are those who talk of money and business as though these were
necessarily and intrinsically evil. It is often supposed that capacity
for goodness is established by incapacity for business, while those to
whom poverty seems inevitable find consolation in regarding it as
evidence of piety.
Large numbers of otherwise sensible people feel that there is some
unavoidable conflict between the ideal and the real, between what they
call the sacred and the secular, between the things they would like to
do and to be and the things they actually have to do as part of their
daily affairs and duties.
Probably the greater number try to meet the difficulty by dividing
their lives and interest into separate parts. They say, business is
business; religion is another thing altogether; I will work hard and
honestly at my business and look forward to the comforts and pleasures
of religion and ideal things.
So it happens that there are those who feel that to speak of religion
on a week-day reveals a lack of the sense of the fitness of things,
while other good people are quite sure that it is a wholly irreverent
thing to speak of business on a Sunday. We tend to dwell alternately
in two sets of apartments, the practical and the pious.
Even where there are no such sharp lines through the life we feel that
manufacture and the market, money-making, and trading tend to blunt the
finer sensibilities and act as a hindrance to the realization of our
ideals, while, on the other hand, we are sure that the life of ideals
is unfitted for business.
The result of this separation and apparent antagonism is that we cannot
develop our lives symmetrically; we are torn by conflicting purposes;
we fail to see any ideal ends in business or to find any practical
values in religion. Religion without business tends to dreamy,
purposeless moral enervation; business without ideal ends and aims to
grossness and materialism.
We need to spiritualize all our acts, our whole lives, our business,
our work, our pleasures, by giving them moral intent and value, so as
to unify the sacred and the secular, the utilitarian, and the ideal by
making each serve the other.
It does not make so much difference whether a man is engaged in
money-making or in writing poems and picturing the fair dreams of
better things; the question is this, is the money-making for the sake
of the money or for some high and worthy end? What is the motive that
impels either the dealer in dollars or the dealer in dreams?
Our ideals, visions, aspirations, and our religion become most damaging
if they fail to find expression in conduct and work; lacking the
practical, they result in a character that is satisfied with
contemplating the good instead of realizing it. The man who sinks his
soul in dollars may personally be no worse than he who allows it to
atrophy while he dreams.
Here in religion are the dynamic and the motives that bear men on and
buoy them up to do the toil, bear the burdens, stand in the fight of
daily living; here are the visions that lift our eyes from the desk and
the machine, from profits and discounts, and help us to see the worthy
prizes of life.
No man could become a saint by separating himself from this world's
turmoil and reading his Bible alone; neither can any man find strength
and stability for life's business and battle, find satisfaction in its
service and rewards, unless he sees through its dollars and its dirt
the moral ends of all this world's work.
This noisy mill of daily living may be the greatest blessing we know;
it is the opportunity for the expression of our highest ideals, for the
translation of religion into terms of daily living; it is the place
where character is molded by its stress, its calls to the strong will,
and its manifold opportunities for the service of all mankind by each
man in his place.