And yet appear arrayed in saintly guise;
Let sable night enshroud my deep deceit,
And clouds conceal my fraud from prying eyes.[17]
—And is there no reason to fear that that spirit has been perpetuated to modern times?
Now, in these remarks, we have just been enforcing a trite, but profound maxim, “What is a man profited, though he could gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul?” Surely men buy gold at too high a price, when their immortal spirits are given in exchange for it. Success in such a case is a terrible disaster, and far better a mercantile crash than eternal ruin. To give ourselves up to the devoted pursuit of the world, and to secure what we pursue, while God and heaven are forsaken, is a calamity to be deplored through all eternity. Better far the cross and the disappointment; better far the shattered hope and the world’s neglect, than to sit with princes and to forfeit heaven—to rank among those whose gold cannot be counted, and yet to be poor, and wretched, and miserable in the high estimate of eternity—There is an animal which strikes the arm with feebleness the moment it is touched. The muscles are benumbed, the sense of feeling is for the time destroyed, and the affected parts are as if they had been struck by lightning, and in a similar way, do this world’s cares benumb or stupify the soul. Its desire for the good and the pure, and its power to enjoy them, are at once destroyed by intense engrossment with the world’s cares; and he who has not felt and lamented the effects of such engrossment, should beware, lest his want of feeling be the result of his want of life.
THE PREVALENCE OF THE FALSE:
INSTANCES.
As a Counsel which we believe to be pre-eminently needed, we observe next, that the man of integrity and Christian principle, will, in the Market-place, THE
PREVALENCE
OF THE
FALSE: comply with none of the conventional maxims of business which are based upon the false.—Were it our object to enter into these things in detail, it would not be difficult to show to what an amazing extent the false, the pretended, the deceptive, now enter into the business of our commercial or mercantile community. It must be enough to say, that the father of lies has taken possession of ten thousand points in business, and often holds them all at the expense of integrity and truth. INSTANCES. Lies are spoken; lies are acted; deceptions are practised; and conscience is all the while prevented from lifting any effectual protest, by the fact that such things are common. Even those channels of public opinion which do not usually adopt the Scriptures of truth as their standard, confess their amazement at the Jesuitical want of ingenuousness, or the incredible amount of dishonesty, which signalizes even those who move in the highest spheres. Descending, that spirit has taken possession of other classes—it has actually come to pass, that he is deemed simple who is upright, or punctilious who is honest. Nay more, in defending this state of moral degeneracy, there are some who do not scruple to quote the Word of the God of truth. “Be not righteous overmuch,” is a favourite passage with some, as if it gave any countenance to him who seeks wealth by disreputable means—by calling that all silk which he knows to be partly made of cotton, or that genuine which he knows to be adulterated, or that perfect which he knows to be defective.—Would that it were superfluous to dwell upon such subjects—that we never had occasion to refer to them and to the Church of God in the same breath! “Serving the Lord”—that clause should banish for ever all such things from the practice and the ways of men professing to be Christians, and if they are not banished, we can picture nothing so likely to make religion an offence, and a Christian profession a subject of scorn, to honest worldly men.
Farther, we have been told that there are some in business who will not credit those who make a profession of godliness. They deem that profession a cloak, and they either tear it off or despise it. Now, we reckon that, to a great extent, just a display of the worldly man’s hatred to the restraints and the sanctities of religion. He knows that such a profession upon his lips would be hypocrisy, and he ignorantly deems it the same in others. Hence his contempt for a religious profession—his distrust of all who make it. Yet, is there no pretext afforded to that worldly man for the opinions which he holds? If those professing religion are known to imitate examples, or to adopt practices, and act upon maxims which religion repudiates—if they be as grasping as those who make no such pretensions as they do, are they not cheering on the ungodly in their unchristian career? Are they not doing all that they can to assure the worldly man that his views of religion are correct—that it is a pretence, hypocrisy, and a name?