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. Business always will be immoral as long as it is an end in itself. The product is greater than the machine, the making of character greater than the mechanism by which we make a living. The serious danger comes when a man begins to lay his soul on the counter, when he reverses the course in this school of character and makes the end serve the means, when he sacrifices honour, truth, and the soul that business may succeed. Only failure lies that way. No business ever became permanently great by making its people small. Success here is to be measured by the soul. No matter what a man may be doing he must keep himself above his task. The work must serve the worker. The question is whether we are serving business or it is serving us. If a man lives for his wage he will sacrifice everything to get it, but if he works that he may find life, then he will ever refuse to lose the things of which life is made in the pursuit of success. He knows he does not have to make money, but he does have to make manhood. That is the end both of religion and of business. THE MORAL END OF MONEY-MAKING There are those who talk of money and business as though these were necessarily and intrinsically evil. It is often supposed that capacity for goodness is established by incapacity for business, while those to whom poverty seems inevitable find consolation in regarding it as evidence of piety.