Now these estimates inseparable from exchanges, and these calculations which are a factor in all the far-reaching exchanges, are mental activities. They quicken and strengthen the _minds_ of men. Trade is usually, if not always, the initial step in the mental development of individuals and nations. Desires stir early in the minds of all children; efforts more or less earnest are the speedy outcome of natural desires; direct efforts, however, to satisfy these soon reach their limits; it is now but a step over to simple exchanges, by which the desires are met indirectly; exchanges once commenced tend to multiply in all directions, and the estimates that must precede and accompany these are mental states,--the more of them, the greater the mental development, the higher the education; consequently, commerce domestic and foreign is a grand agency in civilization, a constant and broadening impulse towards progress in all its forms; and Christianity, as we have already seen, is friendly to commerce in its every breath. Those, therefore, who talk and preach about Trade as tending to _materialism_, do not know what they are talking about. Because Commodities are material things, and because a portion of the trade of the world concerns itself with commodities, these shallow thinkers jump to the conclusion that trade is materialistic. _It is just the reverse._ Let us hear no more from Professor Pulpit or Platform that buying and selling is antagonistic to men's higher intellectual and spiritual culture, because the present careful analysis has brought us indubitably to mental Estimates and prolonged comparisons, which are activities of Mind, as the fourth and a leading factor among the radical elements of Sale. (e) _There were two renderings_, King Hiram's rendering at Joppa the desired cedars from the mountains of Lebanon, and King Solomon's rendering in return at Tyre the food products grown in his fertile country. These renderings were visible to all men. Unlike the desires and the estimates, which were subjective and invisible; the actual exchange of the products, the culmination of the previous efforts, the stipulated renderings by and to each party, were outward and objective--"known and read of all men." This is the reason why public attention is always strongly drawn to this particular link of the chain of events which we are now unlocking and taking apart, while other links of the series, that are just as essential, almost wholly escape observation. The ports and the markets are apt to be noisy and conspicuous, when the desires and the estimates and the satisfactions, without which in their place there would be no market-places, work in silence, and leave no records except the indirect one of the renderings themselves.