Article September 3, 1904 Issue

From our Exchanges

with contributions from Josiah Strong

A Christian minister ought to know how to teach the way in which spiritual truth can find its material embodiment in home life, in social life, in business methods, and in commercial transactions; and also in national affairs and in international relations. He should not be the partisan of one class against another class, of labor against capital, or of capital against labor; but he should bring home a sense of living responsibility to individuals of all classes, of their duty to carry out in practice the principles of Christian ethics in all the ordinary relations of their daily lives. This sense of personal obligation should be insisted upon in the Christianization of business. Our music, painting, architecture, and literature have all been largely Christianized; while manufacture and commerce and industry in general are to-day more pagan than Christian. If a preacher could demonstrate to the unbelieving world that the Golden Rule of the Gospel is practicable in business, he would do more for the kingdom than if he were to preach, with all the eloquence of a Chrysostom, about a spiritual life that ignored our duties of social service.

Josiah Strong, D.D., L.L.D.
Homiletic Review.

To banish one's self to the Devil's Island of soul solitude, to be as much alone in the crowded street as Robinson Crusoe was when cast away from the world and the faces of men, to rise up in the morning and to lie down at night with the perpetual consciousness that every man's hands are against us, and to look forward to death knowing that we shall go down to the grave unregretted by men, what worse fate could one wish for one's worst enemy? And this is the catastrophe which awaits those who live only for themselves. In piling up they have left themselves empty. In gathering they have scattered. In seeking life they have lost it. There is no use of going outside of the plain facts and experiences of life to discover a Nemesis which will overtake those who disobey the laws of God written in our hearts.—The Universalist Leader.

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