Christianity and Business.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 533, 16 August 1932, Page 6

Christianity and Business.

To the Editor. Dear Sir, —Mr W. Nash, Labour M.P., lately said in a public address that he did not think it possible be at one and the same time a Christian and a successful business man. The soundness of this deduction depends as a matter of elementary logic on the definition which is given to the inordinately elastic term. “ Christian.** If we believe with Martin Luther that “ every doer of the law and every moral worker is accursed for he walketh in the presumption of his own righteousness”; if we believe with the same vehement ecclesiastic that “ he that says the gospel requires works for salvation is fiat and plain a liar**; if we believe with John Wesley that being moral “is nothing before God”: if we believe, as an eminent Catholic has put it, that Christian “salvation is an act of mercy and* may be granted even to one who has noj merit ”; if we believe with St Paul that “ man is justified by faith without works of the law. for him that worketh not. but believeth, his faith is counted for righteousness ”; if. in consonance with the Westminster Creed, we affirm that “ much less can men not professing the Christian religion be saved be they never so diligent to frame their lives according to the light of nature and to assert and maintain that they can is very pernicious ** —then, perforce, we must grant that it is possible for a man to run even a business successfully and be a true Christian. That it is impossible for moral sentiments to find a full and unhampered expression in life under the present social system is a fact which Socialists are tired of pointing out. Many of them are also weary of emphasising that morality and religion are not convertible terms; that the relation of morality to religion is not one of dependance; and that many Christian doctrines, such as those quoted above, are morally subversive, and quite compatible with an industrialism wherein the individual is compelled by economic pressure to fight for his own hand and thus to keep severely in check his altruistic impulses. Edward Carpenter, in his “Civilisation, Its Cause and Cure,” wisely points that a respectability based on property is the keynote of the present social order. There is nothing to-day so respectable as having property or potential property, that is, money. Desires which run counter to the acquisition of property are regarded as of secondary, or of no importance, and yet it is easy to show that the fulfilment of such desires is the very life breath of true individualism as opposed to that “ dead uniformity of character and purpose ” which the acquiring of wealth promotes. The very acme of inconsistency is represented by those persons who. while professing to lie followers of One who had not a place in which to lay His head and who scorned material things, yet stand four-square for the preservation of the existing social order, with its narrow flesh-pot philosophy of mine and of thine, and its gross economic negation of the fundamental law of gregari-, ousness and social co-operation, the Golden* Rule, which, so the ethical Christ declared, embraces the whole of the law and the prophets. In fact, a more fitting subject for savage satire than these same “Christians” it would be hard to find. Oh, for the pen of a Swift or a Tunius!—l am, etc, LOOKING FORWARD,