So it happens that there are those who feel that to speak of religion on a week-day reveals a lack of the sense of the fitness of things, while other good people are quite sure that it is a wholly irreverent thing to speak of business on a Sunday. We tend to dwell alternately in two sets of apartments, the practical and the pious.
Even where there are no such sharp lines through the life we feel that manufacture and the market, money-making, and trading tend to blunt the finer sensibilities and act as a hindrance to the realization of our ideals, while, on the other hand, we are sure that the life of ideals is unfitted for business.
The result of this separation and apparent antagonism is that we cannot develop our lives symmetrically; we are torn by conflicting purposes; we fail to see any ideal ends in business or to find any practical values in religion. Religion without business tends to dreamy, purposeless moral enervation; business without ideal ends and aims to grossness and materialism.
We need to spiritualize all our acts, our whole lives, our business, our work, our pleasures, by giving them moral intent and value, so as to unify the sacred and the secular, the utilitarian, and the ideal by making each serve the other.
It does not make so much difference whether a man is engaged in money-making or in writing poems and picturing the fair dreams of better things; the question is this, is the money-making for the sake of the money or for some high and worthy end? What is the motive that impels either the dealer in dollars or the dealer in dreams?
Our ideals, visions, aspirations, and our religion become most damaging if they fail to find expression in conduct and work; lacking the practical, they result in a character that is satisfied with contemplating the good instead of realizing it. The man who sinks his soul in dollars may personally be no worse than he who allows it to atrophy while he dreams.
Here in religion are the dynamic and the motives that bear men on and buoy them up to do the toil, bear the burdens, stand in the fight of daily living; here are the visions that lift our eyes from the desk and the machine, from profits and discounts, and help us to see the worthy prizes of life.