PRINCIPLE.
On the one hand, then, some are diligent in their business; but they forget to serve the Lord, and so their business becomes the grave of the soul. On the other hand, some would serve Him; but they keep that service apart from their business: they are as worldly there, as selfish, as ready to grasp and to amass, as if responsibility to God could be shut up in the Bible after a passage of it has been formally perused. PRINCIPLE. But the Christian merchant comes in between these two. In the one hand he takes the clause, “Be not slothful in business;” in the other he takes the words, “Serving the Lord.” He unites them in his life; that is, he takes religion from the Bible; and instead of separating what God has joined—namely, diligence and godliness—that man is perfectly convinced, because the Spirit of God is his teacher, that success would be a curse, that thousands added to thousands would only augment his woe, were he to leave the will of God out of view in the place of public resort.
With this general truth before us, then, if we be Christians at all, we must be Christians everywhere, let us consider some Counsels tending to make us Christians, according to the standard of the Bible. How may I assuredly retain my Christianity in the Market-place, in the haunts of Commerce, or among its busy men? An answer to that question may serve as a guide through what is, in truth, a deep and dangerous morass.
WICKEDNESS AND FOLLY, ONE.
THE WOE OF THE WICKED.
And the first Counsel we would announce is this: God is a party in all our transactions in the Market-place; we are either serving him or sinning against him in all that we do. It is to be feared, indeed, that many forget this simple truth amid their manifold engrossments. They forget that the God of justice is a party in men’s unjust proceedings; that the God of truth is a witness to all their falsehood; that He who cannot look on sin is present at every act, detecting fraud and deceit wherever they appear. In very emphatic language, men thus make the Holy One “serve with their sins;” He supplies the power, the skill, the reason, which they pervert into instruments of iniquity against him and fraud upon their fellow-men. But shunning all this, it should be our rooted maxim in the Market-place, and everywhere besides, that that Holy One is a party in all that we do; he is either served or sinned against. We cannot swerve from truth, we cannot violate justice, we cannot let go our integrity, without forsaking Him. It should, therefore, be as firmly rooted in our convictions as the most simple moral truth, that whatever dishonours God cannot benefit us. WICKEDNESS
AND FOLLY,
ONE. It should be written on the conscience as with a pen of iron upon a rock, that the man who expects true success in violating the eternal principles of right and wrong, is not merely wicked, but foolish. The man who expects to prosper by “glossy fraud,” has already inflicted a sore degradation on his moral nature. Even though he may be lifted up by wealth to sit among princes, he is, in the eyes of God, a degraded and an outcast creature. THE WOE
OF THE
WICKED. He has sold his soul for what must soon be wrung from his grasp. He has bowed down to an idol as senseless, and as unable to bless him, as the stone god of the Hindoo devotee. Though a world were in league to prove the contrary, ungodly gain wraps up a curse in it; and the larger the pile, the more deadly or crushing are its effects. Those were solemn words which Eliphaz spoke to Job: “I saw him taking root, but I cursed his habitation.”[16]
Let God, then, be recognised as a party in all that is done. Be it our maxim, in the market-place as well as on our knees: “Thou, God, seest me;” and it will at once fortify and warn us. He who forgets that simple principle in our busy day, is like one who casts the pilot overboard when the tempest is rising.
The suggestion now offered would at once sweep away those petty encroachments which pass in the world almost without rebuke, but which are an offence to the Holy One. It seemed a small and venial thing to Eve to do what she did, and to Adam to follow her example; but that little thing dragged the world to ruin. And so before God, offences deemed venial by man are seen in the defilement and the hatefulness of sin. Hence the call to act under the divine eye—to adopt the divine standard—to make God a party in all our proceedings. His holiness, his justice and truth, should at once repress the unprincipled and encourage the pure; and man would then be made upright towards man by being made right with God.
MAKING HASTE TO BE RICH.