Men
are talking about the institutions in which you are engaged, my friends, about
the business from which you have come here to worship for this little hour. Men
are questioning about what they care to do, what they can have to do with
Christianity. They are asking everywhere this question: "Is it possible
for a man to be engaged in the activities of our modern life and yet to be a
Christian? Is it possible for a man to be a broker, a shopkeeper, a lawyer, a
mechanic, is it possible for a man to be engaged in a business of to-day, and
yet love his God and his fellow-man as himself?" I do not know. I do not
know what transformations these dear businesses of yours have got to undergo
before they shall be true and ideal homes for the child of God; but I do know
that upon Christian merchants and Christian brokers and Christian lawyers and
Christian men in business to-day there rests an awful and a beautiful
responsibility: to prove, if you can prove it, that these things are capable of
being made divine, to prove that a man can do the work that you have been doing
this morning and will do this afternoon, and yet shall love his God and his
fellow-man as himself. If he cannot, if he cannot, what business have you to be
doing them? If he can, what business have you to be doing them so poorly, so
carnally, so unspiritually, that men look on them and shake their heads with
doubt? It belongs to Christ in men first to prove that man may be a Christian
and yet do business; and, in the second place, to show how a man, as he becomes
a greater Christian, shall purify and lift the business that he does and make
it the worthy occupation of the Son of God.
Year 1895
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