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I. BUSINESS MEN REQUIRE SYMPATHY. We often hear that "business is business," as if it were some lonely island at which no ship of religion ever called, or if it did call it would find but scant welcome. This morning, however, the ship calls at the port, and the captain asks what he can do for you. You are now face to face with one who understands you, in your difficulties, disappointments, and temptations. By so much I would claim your confidence. When you therefore come up out of the market-place into the church, what do you want? If you had been spending the week in gathering violets and in cultivating orchids, I should address you in a very different tone; but the most of you have just laid down your tools, you have not shaken the world from you yet, and therefore you cannot enter into high speculation and transcendental imaginings, or even into fine points of criticism. You want a broad, sympathetic gospel, standards by which you can at once adjust yourselves to God's claim upon you. Therein is the preacher's great difficulty. He is not an academic lecturer surrounded by persons who have been spending six days in preparation for the seventh. Probably there are not six men in this house who have been able to say to the world at the door of the church, "Stand thou here, whilst I go up and worship yonder," and the world permitted to come over the threshold remains to throw a veil between the preacher and his hearer, to excite prejudice and throw the music of revelation into discord. What a weary life is that of the man of business! Always beginning, never ending. He writes a letter that is to form a conclusion, and behold it only starts a more voluminous correspondence. What with orders half completed, money half paid or not paid, responsibilities ignored, discoveries of untrustworthiness on the part of the most trusted, the wonder is that business men can live at all. The Christian preacher, therefore, must recognise their difficulties, and not regard them as if they and he had been living all the week in a great cloud full of angels.

II. BUSINESS HAS ITS BOUNDARIES. You are limited by health, time, the incapacity of others, by a thousand necessities.

1. Thank God, therefore, if Parliament takes hold of you and says, "You shall rest to-day." It is your commercial, intellectual, and moral salvation. You recover yourselves within those four-and-twenty hours: the very act of closing the book and saying, "I cannot open that until Monday morning" is itself the beginning of a religious blessing. What then have you to do? You have to meet that from the other side by sympathy, by joyful acquiescence, so as to get the most and the best out of the arrangement.

2. You brought nothing into the world, and it is certain you can carry nothing out. What; is the end, therefore, of all this anxiety and toil and sleeplessness? Christ says, "Which of you by multiplying worry and fret can accomplish anything beyond the limits that God has imposed upon you?" If you could show that to-day's anxiety would bring to-morrow's success, then it would be justified.

III. BUSINESS IS A GREAT SCIENCE. No business man can be an uneducated man. He may never have been at school, but we do not get our education at school: there we get the tools, hints, and suggestions which we may turn to profit subsequently; but our education we get in the world, in social collisions, in having to work out the great practical problems of life and time. Why, the medical man tells me, after I have read all my books, that I must go to the bedside to learn to be a doctor. And the navigator tells me that after I have studied all the mathematics of navigation I must go to sea in order to be a high nautical authority. And so we must go into the practical, real engagements of life in order to be truly educated.

IV. BUSINESS SUCCESS DEPENDS ON DILIGENCE. It is possible for a man of the very finest capacity to be put in circumstances which overpower him; to pass in at the wrong door, and not get back again. Such men have my sympathy. But there are others who often come to me in distress, whose criticism upon life would be comical if it were not too sad in its unreality and untruth. Let me suppose that I am a business man in your sense of the term. I plan, scheme, go to my work, upbraiding the light for being so long in coming, and leave it — upbraiding the light for going away so soon. I succeed, retire, and am a rich man. What does the individual referred to say? "You have been very fortunate." Is that true? What did he do? Went to business at nine with his hands in his pockets, looked over the door, came back and gossiped with the first person that was fool enough to waste his time with him — was very anxious to know from the papers what was going to be done fifteen thousand miles away from his place of business, went home at four o'clock, and he calls me a fortunate man! Fortunate? No — "be not deceived; God is not mocked; whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap." The men who like their work, do it joyfully, and when it is done are proud of it, and those who engage them are proud of them and their work too — those men deserve success.

V. I CLAIM BUSINESS MEN FOR CHRIST. Let me tell you why.

1. Without faith you could not conduct your business; you deal with men whom you have never seen, you base your connection upon written authority; you venture and incur risk. By such experiments and engagements you enter into the very spirit of faith. In the Christian kingdom we walk by faith, and not by sight; we venture upon Christ — we risk it.

2. You know what preparation is. You have apprenticeships, you say that a certain seed sown will produce a certain result — but not to-morrow: you have to wait and trust in the outworking of great eternal laws. In the Christian kingdom we have to do just the same.

3. I claim you business men for Christ, men with clear understandings, resolute wills, and ask you to accept the great mystery of this Christian kingdom. It will go with you through all your engagements, it will turn your water into wine, it will relieve your perplexities, and be the solace of your solitude. Let Christ be head of your firm, The Lord thy God giveth thee power to get wealth — praise God from whom all blessings flow. Conclusion: Diligent in business — not absorbed in, anxious about, overmastered by it. Let your object be not to gain the mere wealth, but to gain something that is better — the discipline, patience, solidity of character, which such engagements of yours tend to work out. He who comes out of business rich in gold only will soon die.

(J. Parker, D.D.)

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KJV: Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord;

WEB: not lagging in diligence; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord;