TWO KINDS OF BUSINESS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA · Sep 6, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 36.

TWO KINDS OF BUSINESS.

DR. WASHINGTON GLADDEN, chairman of the Congregational Board of Missions, moderator of the National Congregational Council, intimates that there is a great deal more money tainted than Mr. Rockefeller's. He thus speaks of the two kinds of commercial business: "There is honorable, clean, and legitimate business in this and other lands. This sort of business lives up to the motto of 'Live and let live,' but there is a gigantic business that means robbery, commercial piracy, as it were, and which in disregard of all laws of fair competition, pushes ahead, leaving misery, poverty, and revolution in its wake. The latter kind of business has no regard for human rights nor constitutional law. The church ought to put its seal of approval on all good business, and its stamp of condemnation on the other kind."

But how can this be the case, when most of the men who are doing the kind of business condemned by Dr. Gladden are members of some of the great ecclesiastical bodies, and are exalted and honored by their own churches? Dr. Gladden alludes to a large percentage of church-goers of the present day as "dead tissue," those who in a lackadaisical manner attend church, but never take an active part in its work. He also states that the Sunday-school attendance is sadly decreasing.

And this is not the testimony of Dr. Gladden alone, but it is manifest everywhere.