Suppose I try to illustrate by reference to the scope of human thinking in general. Ethical theology might be represented then as an inverted pyramid,--thus [Illustration: inverted triangle]; hard, skeptical science by a larger figure, pressing it down; the highest philosophy by a circle,--something like this figure. The largest thought accepts all, surrounds all, absorbs all,--like light itself. The ugly and the beautiful, the ignorant and the wise, the virtuous and the vile,--all come within its recognition; nature and sins as well as societies and clubs,--prisons and churches, brothels and houses. The very duties of observation forced upon you compel two things: the study of all moral and material details; the study of all combinations and wholes. And the larger the grasp of the whole the larger must become your power and value; for you will have to see eternal laws working down out of the unknown and thereafter ramifying and inter-ramifying into innumerable actions, reactions, disintegrations, and crystallizations. The horrible thing about business, men say, is that it considers men as pawns. But if your sight becomes large enough,--if your thought widens enough,--you _must_ look upon men as pawns. To be a brother to all you cannot. To be a friend to many you cannot. You become the agent--not of the Commercial Union Assurance Co. only,--but the special agent of infinite laws; and if you act efficiently in that capacity, you cannot do very wrong. The Cosmos will be responsible for you.
The business man to-day is the king of the earth; merchants and bankers are the rulers, and will for all time be, while industrialism continues necessary. They seek and win power, and all the good things of life; they also prevent others from getting either. They may not be poets, philosophers, didactic teachers, artists; but their mental organization is undoubtedly the highest,--because its achievements represent the mastery of the highest difficulties, the deepest problems, the most intricate riddles. Certainly this higher organization is obtained at a heavy cost in the majority of cases. The emotions dry up in the evolution of it, and the moral sense weakens. But because this must happen in the majority of cases when any _new_ faculty is being developed, it is far from happening in all. The man whose vision is vast enough can scarcely do more evil than a god. He cannot injure his world voluntarily without suffering from his own action. He must study his world as a naturalist his ant-hill. And even as a God he must feel the ultimate evil and good is not of him; but is being forever viewlessly woven in Shadow by the Fates of the Infinite,--whose distaff twists the thread of his own life, and whose will guides his own courses.