strife. It is whether you can measure steadily towards heaven's ideal
while mastering earth's daily duties.

The question is either a reproach to religion or to business. It is
assumed by many, with especial conviction by those who know business
only by reputation, that it demands the sacrifice constantly of honour,
truth, mercy, and every other virtue. The man who thinks that he is
pious because he is pulseless, draws a fancy picture of red-blooded men
fighting, intriguing, slaying, like demons new from the pit; and that,
he thinks, is modern business.

Strife is everywhere. If religion means sequestration from temptation
we need to pray to be delivered from it. There is as much danger of a
man's losing his character, selling his soul, in the church as in the
market. The temptation to the merchant to misrepresent his goods for a
larger profit is not greater than that which comes to the minister to
magnify his abilities for an increase in fame.

Things honourable are the same everywhere; they are written deep within
us, and by them church and mart both are judged. Every man knows that
the chief business of life, whether through commerce, toil, study,
recreation, or worship, is to develop the best life, to make of himself
a true, full grown man, who shall render to this world a full man's
service.

Business is a more effective school of character than any other we
have. If some of the standards of that school have been unworthy--and
who shall say they have not?--it is our duty to revise them, to make
them higher; not to abolish the school, not to stay away from it
because it is imperfect, but to make it fit to serve its true purpose.