Christianity in Business Life
By Phillips Brooks
MEN are asking everywhere this question: "Is it possible for a man to be engaged in the activities of our modern life, and yet be a Christian? Is it possible for a man to be a broker, a shopkeeper, a lawyer, a mechanic—is it possible for a man to be in a business of to-day and yet love his God and his fellow man as himself?" I do not know what transformations these dear businesses of yours must undergo before they shall be true and ideal homes for the child of God, but I do know that upon Christian merchants and Christian brokers and Christian lawyers and Christian men in business to-day there rests an awful and a beautiful responsibility to prove—if you can prove it—that these things are capable of being made divine; to prove that a man can do the work which you have been doing this morning, and will do this afternoon, and yet shall love his God and his fellow man as himself. If he can not, what business have you to be doing them? If he can, what business have you to be doing them so poorly, carnally, and unspiritually that men look on them and shake their heads with doubt? It belongs to Christ in men, first, to prove that man may be a Christian and yet do business; and, in the second place, to show how a man, as he becomes a greater Christian, shall purify and lift the business which he does and make it the worthy occupation of the son of God.—Bishop Phillips Brooks.