“It may look to some a degradation of the pulpit, when the household servant is told to make her firm stand against the temptation of open doors and secret opportunities; or when the confidential agent is told to resist the slightest inclination to any unseen freedom with the property of his employers, or to any discoverable excess in the charges of his management; or when the receiver of a humble payment is told that the tribute which is due on every written acknowledgment ought faithfully to be met, and not fictitiously to be evaded. This is not robbing religion of its sacredness, but spreading its sacredness over the face of society. It is evangelizing human life by impregnating its minutest transactions with the Spirit of the Gospel.”—Dr. Chalmers.
“He lives in a cottage, and yet he is a king and a priest unto God. He is fixed for life to the ignoble drudgery of a workman, and yet he is on the full march to a blissful immortality. He is a child in the mysteries of science, but familiar with greater mysteries. That preaching of the cross which is foolishness to others, he feels to be the power of God and the wisdom of God.”—Dr. Chalmers.
“We state it as our opinion, that though the whole business of the world were in the hands of men thoroughly Christianized, and who, rating wealth according to its real dimensions on the high scale of eternity, were chastened out of all their idolatrous regards to it; yet would trade, in these circumstances, be carried to the extreme limit of its being really productive or desirable. An affection for riches beyond what Christianity prescribes, is not essential to any extension of commerce that is at all valuable or legitimate; and in opposition to the maxim that the spirit of enterprise is the soul of commercial prosperity, do we hold that it is the excess of this spirit beyond the moderation of the New Testament, which, pressing on the natural boundaries of trade, is sure at length to visit every country where it operates with the record of all those calamities which, in the shape of beggared capitalists and unemployed operatives, and dreary intervals of bankruptcy and alarm, are observed to follow a season of overdone speculation.”—Dr. Chalmers.
Gouge, in his “Surest and Safest Way of Thriving,” tells of an eminent physician of his day, Dr.Bathurst, that “all his Lord’s-day fees were kept as a bank for the poor.”
Sir Walter Scott. The closing chapter of his Life by J.G. Lockhart ranks among the most melancholy and instructive portions of our literature. Could aught but a divine power undeceive the sons of men, these chapters might undeceive them.
