To take another of the great problems which press upon us in these days, viz: the relation of Christianity to business. “Business is business” too often means that Christian principles cannot be applied to it. There are so many things a man “must do” if he is to get along at all. “It is better to leave religion out altogether in some of these practical affairs.” In non-Christian countries we constantly see the divorce of ethics from religion; and I am afraid the evil is not confined to distant lands. We all know something of the pulpit that dare not denounce the sins practiced by the wealthiest of the congregation: the minister whose tongue is tied upon sweating and overcrowding: the church-member who is zealous in the observance of religion, but lacking in his business obligations.
What a need for the thoroughgoing Christian who has ideals and maintains them in everyday life, who will not lower them to suit the exigencies of life, or the pressure of social custom, to whom expediency is a forbidden word even though its exclusion may mean the Cross!
Or turn to the great non-Christian world with which we are daily brought into contact. Here is one of the greatest problems, if not the greatest, which confronts our civilization to-day. How are we going to meet our fellow-men of other races? The politician has his solution: the commercial man has his. What is to be the solution of the citizen of the Kingdom of God? There can only be one answer: we must go to these men as to those who are our brethren; we must see them not as wholly bad or depraved, but as those who have in them infinite potentialities, who are called into the same citizenship and the same sonship which we enjoy. We must reaffirm to-day our belief in that Light which lighteth every man, but we dare not be content at that. As our forefathers led the way in the understanding of sympathy with other races; so we to whom these still more intricate problems present themselves, must stand for the ideal, however hard it seems—the ideal of spiritual kinship and the strenuous effort to realize it in our relationship with other races; and so it comes about that the Foreign Missionary enterprise seems to be of the very essence of Quakerism, and that we find it closely akin to the great causes of Peace and Anti-slavery with which our Society has ever been identified. Is the Church of Christ playing the part which it ought to play in regard to these matters? Is it taking the stand which it ought to take in regard to the color problem in this country, in regard to the export of spirituous liquors, and so forth? What, indeed, is to be our view of a Christian Mission College which deliberately includes in its curriculum military drill with the full paraphernalia of warfare, and this in the traditionally peace-loving empire of China? To me it seems evident that there is a great place for the Society of Friends in this movement, just because we stand upon the side of idealism in all these complicated issues.