The Birkenhead News and Wirral General Advertiser. — 1888-12-01 (Birkenhead, Merseyside, England)

RELIGION IN COMMERCE." I UNITARIAN SERVICES AT LISCARD. A series of Sunday evening services, conducted by Unitarian ministers of Birkenhead and Liverpool, are being held in the Concert Ball, Liscard. The services have been generally well attended, but on Sunday evening hut, owing probably to the extremely inclement weather, there was not a large congregation. The preacher was the Rev. Felix Taylor, B.A , of Hamilton.road Unitarian Church, Liverpool, who took for the subject of his discourse " Religion in commerce." The preacher remarked that the common estimate of business life and its aims was far too low. The men whom the world called independent looked down upon the man who was engaged in commerce. That was to say theleast of it "snobbish," but it must beremembared that the merchant was just as" snobbish" in his way, looking down on the tradesman,as the tradesman looked down upon the artisan, with a sublime sort of distant scorn. They often heard of mammon worship, and if it were proper to speak of a defunct personage, they should sometimes be inclined to say that the god of commerce was the devil. But still commerce had its religious aims, a feeling after God, and a working for God which made it one of the noblest pursuits. There was no such thing as independence, and the more money a man had the more was he dependent upon those around him. There was no doubt that in commerce a great deal of meanness and dishonesty existed. The spectacle of a man on the Exchange being rich in the morning and beggared in the evening was an evidence of that. Nay more, in commerce there was a murder committed, murder which was licensed—for was it not murder if a man sold him an article wiki, was adulterated and which shortened 11,s Lie. Thank God, however, that the statements they read in the newspapers were not wholly true, and business life was a nobler thing than was sometimes made out. Business men had been at the root of nearly all the graft reforms the world had ever seen. They found that Christianity first flourished, not at Rome or at Athens, but st Corinth, the great mercantile city of the ancient world. The Huguenots, the Puritans, and the Covenanters were not divinity professors ot students, but hard•handed men, who ruled the world through the world's necessities. "The king of men," said Carlyle," is the ablest man, the man who knows and the man who can direct." And there were some business men who ruled armies of men more successfully than the generals to whom they erected statues in Westminster Abbey. They were now speaking of the ideal busis.ess man, but they knew from experience that the ideal was not always the actual. So long as a man looked upon commercial pursuits as merely a means of raising money he would never be truly religious. They could not do their duty to men and live for mere money getting. He saw a statement lately that out of the 500,000 people of Liverpool there were only 1,100 men who supported the charities of the city. That showed that Liverpool wanted converting to Christianity as much as any city in the world. The preacher went on to speak of the qualities which made English• men succesufui in business life all the world over, and said that while some people found their heroes in generals and warriors, he preferred to find his heroes in men who stood to their post. 'What more heroic than a man who stands by a concern which does not profit him for the sake of his creditors and for the sake of his workmen? In commerce there was room for the exercise of every Christian virtue.