If all the world did not trust all the world, we could not do
business for a single day. The amount of coin and bank-notes in
circulation is ridiculously inadequate to the needs of business.
By far the larger part of every day’s transactions of every kind
is conducted by means of promises to pay.
The National Monetary Commission has just reported an
investigation of this matter. About seventy per cent of the
daily bank deposits consists of checks. More than ninety per
cent of the payments in wholesale dealings is made by checks,
and even more than half of the retail business is conducted
in the same way, while the banks report weekly pay-rolls
aggregating $134,800,000, seventy per cent of which is settled
by checks.
This is a gigantic illustration of the principle of faith. We
have faith in the integrity of the average man. We have faith
in the business institutions of the country. We have faith that
the future will be as good as the past. And in this faith we
continue to accept bits of paper in return for most of our labor
and the goods we sell.
In exalting the principle of faith in our relations toward God
and the concerns of the next world, religion is merely applying
to the Owner of all things the same rules that we apply without
question to the petty properties of earth.--_Christian
Endeavor World._
(1043)
=Faith of Friends=--See DEPENDENCE.