and that you make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, even as we charged you;
As Ward expressed it, "This is the charter of dignity for manual labor ... work is not beneath the dignity of a free man."[17] Among the Greeks, work was despised as the employment of slaves; and it will be remembered that the false teachers of Corinth belittled Paul's teaching because he labored with his hands.  No wonder a civilization like that perished. "Christianity did not hesitate to insist on the dignity of common labor."[18]