Marshall County Independent

TALMAGE'S SERMON.

BUSINESS LIFE,
LAST SUNDAY'S SUBJECT.

A Lecture in Common Honesty-"Not Slothful In Business; Fervent in Spirit; Serving the Lord"-Rom. 12:11.

(Copyright 1899 by Louis Klopsch.)

Industry, devoutness and Christian service -all commended in that short text. What! is it possible that they shall be conjoined? Oh, yes. There is no war between religion and business, between ledgers and Bibles, between churches and country houses. On the contrary, religion accelerates business, sharpens men's wits, sweetens acerbity of disposition, fillips the blood of phlegmatics, and throws more velocity into the wheels of hard work. It gives better balancing to the judgment, more strength to the will, more muscle to industry, and throws into enthusiasm a more consecrated fire. You cannot in all the circle of the world show me a man whose honest business has been despoiled by religion.

The industrial classes are divided into three groups: producers, manufacturers, traders. Producers, such as farmers and miners. Manufacturers such as those who turn corn into food, and wool and flax into apparel. Traders, such as make profit out of the transfer and exchange of all that which is produced and manufactured. A business man may belong to any one or all of these classes, and not one is independent of any other.

When the Prince Imperial of France fell on the Zulu battlefield because the strap fastening the stirrup to the saddle broke as he clung to it, his comrades all escaping, but he falling under the lances of the savages, a great many people blamed the Empress for allowing her son to go forth into that battlefield, and others blamed the English government for accepting the sacrifice, and others blamed the Zulus for their barbarism. The one most to blame was the harnessmaker who fashioned that strap of the stirrup out of shoddy and imperfect material as it was found to have been afterward. If the strap had held, the Prince Imperial would probably have been alive today. But the strap broke. No prince independent of a harnessmaker! High, low, wise, ignorant, you in one occupation, I in another, all bound together. So that there must be one continuous line of sympathy with each other's work. But whatever your vocation, if you have a multiplicity of engagements, if into your life there come losses and annoyances and perturbations as well as percentages and dividends, if you are pursued from Monday morning until Saturday night, and from January to January by inexorable obligation and duty, then you are a business man, or you are a business woman, and my subject is appropriate to your case.

Traders in grain come to know something about foreign harvests; traders in fruit come to know something about the prospects of tropical production; manufacturers of American goods come to understand the tariff on imported articles; publishers of books must come to understand the new law of copyright; owners of ships must come to know winds and shoals and navigation; and every bale of cotton, and every raisin cask, and every tea box and every cluster of bananas is so much literature for a business man.

Now, my brother, what are you going to do with the intelligence? Do you suppose God put you in this school of information merely that you might be sharper in a trade, that you might be more successful as a worldling? Oh, no: it was that you might take that useful information and use it for Jesus Christ.

Can it be that you have been dealing with foreign lands and never had the missionary spirit, wishing the salvation of foreign people? Can it be that you have become acquainted with all the outrages inflicted in business life and that you have never tried to bring to bear that Gospel which is to extirpate all evil and correct all wrongs and illumine all darkness and lift up all wretchedness and save men for this world and the world to come? Can it be that understanding all the intricacies of business you know nothing about those things which will last after all bills of exchange and consignments and invoices and rent rolls shall have crumpled up and been consumed in the fires of the last great day? Can it be that a man will be wise for time and a fool for eternity?

I remark, also, that business life is a school for integrity. No man knows what he will do until he is tempted. There are thousands of men who have kept their integrity merely because they never have been tested. A man was elected treasurer of the State of Maine some years ago. He was distinguished for his honesty, usefulness and uprightness, but before one year had passed he had taken of the public funds for his own private use, and was hurled out of office in disgrace. Distinguished for virtue before. Distinguished for crime after. You can call over the names of men just like that in whose honesty you had complete confidence, but placed in certain crises of temptation they went overboard.

Never so many temptations to scoundrelism as now. Not a law on the statute book but has some back door through which a miscreant can escape. Ah! how many deceptions in the fabric of goods; so much plundering in commercial life that if a man talk about living a life of complete commercial integrity there are those who ascribe it to greenness and lack of tact. More need of honesty now than ever before, tried honesty, complete honesty, more than in those times when business was a plain affair and woolens were woolens, and silks were silks and men were men.

How many men do you suppose there are in commercial life who could say truthfully, "In all the sales I have ever made I have never overstated the value of goods; in all the sales I have ever made I have never covered up an imperfection in the fabric; of all the thousands of dollars I have ever made I have not taken one dishonest farthing?" There are men, however, who can say it, hundreds who can say it, thousands who can say it. They are more honest than when they sold their first tierce of rice, or their first firkin of butter, because their honesty and integrity have been tested, tried and come out triumphant. But they remember a time when they could have robbed a partner, or have absconded with the funds of a bank, or sprung a snap judgment, or made a false assignment, or borrowed illimitably without any efforts at payment, or got a man into a sharp corner and fleeced him. But they never took one step on that pathway of hell fire. They can say their prayers without hearing the chink of dishonest dollars. They can read their Bible without thinking of the time when with a lie on their soul in the custom house they kissed the book. They can think of death and the judgment that comes after it without any flinching-that day when all charlatans and cheats, and jockeys and frauds shall be doubly damned. It does not make their knees knock together, and it does not make their teeth chatter to read "as the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not: so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool."

What a school of integrity business life is! If you have ever been tempted to let your integrity cringe before present advantage, if you have ever wakened up in some embarrassment, and said: 'Now, I will step a little aside from the right path and no one will know it, and I will come all right again, it is only once.' That only once has ruined tens of thousands of men for this life and blasted their souls for eternity.

A merchant in Liverpool got a five-pound Bank of England note, and, holding it up toward the light, he saw some interlineations in what seemed red ink. He finally deciphered the letters, and found out that the writing had been made by a slave in Algiers, saying in substance: 'Whoever gets this bank note will please to inform my brother, John Dean, living near Carlisle, that I am a slave of the Bey of Algiers.' The merchant sent word, employed government officers and found who this man was spoken of in this bank bill. After awhile the man was rescued, who for eleven years had been a slave of the Bey of Algiers. He was immediately emancipated, but was so worn out by hardship and exposure he soon after died. Oh, if some of the bank bills that come through your hands could tell all the scenes through which they have passed, it would be a tragedy eclipsing any drama of Shakespeare, mightier than King Lear or Macbeth!

As I go on in this subject, I am impressed with the importance of our having more sympathy with business men. Is it not a shame that we in our pulpits do not oftener preach about their struggles, their trials, and their temptations? Men who toil with the hand are not apt to be very sympathetic with those who toil with the brain. The farmers who raise the corn and oats and the wheat sometimes are tempted to think that grain merchants have an easy time, and get their profits without giving any equivalent. Plato and Aristotle were so opposed to merchandise that they declared commerce to be the curse of the nation, and they advised that cities be built at least ten miles from the sea coast. But you and I know that there are no more industrious or high minded men than those who move in the world of traffic. Some of them carry burdens heavier than hods of brick, and are exposed to sharper things than the east wind, and climb mountains higher than the Alps or Himalaya, and if they are faithful Christ will at last say to them: "Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."

We talk about the martyrs of the Piedmont valley, and the martyrs among the Scotch highlands, and the martyrs at Oxford. There are just as certainly martyrs of Wall street and State street, martyrs of Fulton street and Broadway, martyrs of Atlantic street and Chestnut street, going through hotter fires, or having their necks under sharper axes. Then it behooves us to banish all fretfulness from our lives, if this subject be true. We look back to the time when we were at school, and we remember the rod, and we remember the hard tasks, and we complained grievously; but now we see it was for the best. Business life is a school, and the tasks are hard, and the chastisements sometimes are very grievous; but do not complain. The hotter the fire the better the refining. There are men before the throne of God this day in triumph who on earth were cheated out of everything but their coffin. They were sued, they were imprisoned for debt, they were throttled by constables with a whole pack of writs, they were sold out by the sheriffs, they had to compromise with their creditors, they had to make assignments. Their dying hours were annoyed by the sharp ringing of the door bell by some impetuous creditor who thought it was outrageous and impudent that a man should dare to die before he paid the last half dollar.

I had a friend who had many misfortunes. Everything went against him. He had good business capacity and was of the best of morals, but he was one of those men such as you have sometimes seen, for whom everything seems to go wrong. His life became to him a plague. When I heard he was dead, I said: "Good-got rid of the sheriffs!" Who are those lustrous souls before the throne? When the question is asked, "Who are they?" the angels standing on the sea of glass respond: "These are they who came out of great business trouble and had their robes washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb."

A man arose in Fulton street prayer meeting and said: "I wish publicly to acknowledge the goodness of God. I was in business trouble. I had money to pay, and I had no means to pay it, and I was in utter despair of all human help and I laid this matter before the Lord, and this morning I went down among some old business friends I had not seen in many years just to make a call, and one said to me, "Why, I am so glad to see you! Walk in. We have some money on our books due you a good while, but we didn't know where you were, and therefore not having your address we could not send it. We are very glad you have come?" And the man standing in Fulton street prayer meeting said: "The amount they paid me was six times what I owed." You say it only happened so? You are unbelieving. God answered that man's prayer.

Oh, you want business grace. Commercial ethics, business honor, laws of trade are all very good in their place, but there are times when you want something more than this world will give you. You want God. For the lack of Him some that you have known have consented to forge, and to maltreat their friends, and to curse their enemies, and their names have been bulletined among scoundrels, and they have been ground to powder; while other men you have known have gone through the very same stress of circumstances triumphant. There are men here today who fought the battle and gained the victory. People come out of that man's store, and they say: "Well, if there ever was a Christian trader, that is one." Integrity kept the books and waited on the customers. Light from the eternal world flashed through the show windows. Love to God and love to man presided in that storehouse. Some day people going through the street notice that the shutters of the window are not down. The bar of that store door has not been removed. People say, "What is the matter?" you go up a little closer, and you see written on the card of that window: "Closed on account of the death of one of the firm." That day all through the circles of business there is talk about how a good man has gone. Boards of trade pass resolutions of sympathy, and churches of Christ pray. "Help, Lord, for the godly man ceaseth." He has made his last bargain, he has suffered his last loss. he has ached with the last fatigue. His children will get the result of his industry, or, if through misfortune there be no dollars left, they will have an estate of prayer and Christian example which will be everlasting. Heavenly rewards for earthly discipline. There "the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest."