Only failure lies that way. No business ever became permanently great by making its people small. Success here is to be measured by the soul. No matter what a man may be doing he must keep himself above his task. The work must serve the worker.
The question is whether we are serving business or it is serving us. If a man lives for his wage he will sacrifice everything to get it, but if he works that he may find life, then he will ever refuse to lose the things of which life is made in the pursuit of success. He knows he does not have to make money, but he does have to make manhood. That is the end both of religion and of business.
THE MORAL END OF MONEY-MAKING
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.