been found that within a period of forty years nine hundred and forty-four out of a thousand business men either failed in their business, or died poor men, while again, taking the United States as a whole, not one man in four, at his death, ever leaves property enough to require a will, or an executor; and this, too, in the richest country on the earth!

Is man then made to toil in vain, or is there a cause for these failures? I know indeed that men talk of nature as being constructed and run only in accord with what they call "the survival of the fittest," and that all her rewards are to be given. only to the few of mighty will or passion who rightly swallow up the substance, if they do not the person, of the many. I do not believe it. I do not believe that failure is the normal lot of man, no more than I believe that pain is his natural condition. Nature has made no provision in the human body for pain. There is no contrivance nor organ whatever for it. If pain comes, it comes as a result of violating nature's wise and beneficent laws for the well-being of the body. Man was not made for pain, and, be it noted, pain is always in the first instances caused by taking into the body an element foreign to it, and the sensation we call pain is nature's protest against its presence. Pain is not ingrained in nature, and, when it comes to us, it comes as a friend to warn us, or, at the last, as a sheriff to arrest the persistent transgressor.

You may carry the analogy if you please into business life. Man was made for success. Yet the multitudes fail. And then we say that success is the exception and failure the rule of life. Not so. The simple fact is that very many men enter upon a business career foredoomed to failure because they ignore the greatest of all laws, the law of righteousness.

Whether you believe it or not, this world was constructed according to righteousness, and the surest way to lose its gold is to forsake or ignore the God who made the gold for humanity's need. True, there are many who consider goodness as naturally and necessarily opposed to the accumulation of wealth, and who stoutly affirm that righteousness is not a factor to be con

sidered in trade,—especially in Wall street, or at a horse mart. Yet, over against such teaching stands the mighty fact that all the world's great mines and all the vast resources of her material wealth are to-day in the hands of avowedly Christian nations, while more than five-sixths of all the property and of all the great money producing enterprises in England, and in the United States, are controlled and conducted by avowedly moral if not by professedly Christian men. Hence it is rather late in the ages to attempt to teach men that the sure way to obtain wealth is to forsake the God who created that wealth.

Why, if there is one fact that stands out like a mighty mountain peak towering over all others, it is this, that virtue is the indispensable condition among men for obtaining security of person and of property, and for maintaining peace, and for securing human happiness.

All the regulations for human society among civilized peoples are made to protect virtue, and to repress vice. And the more advanced the civilization becomes, the more indispensable, both to the individual and to society, is virtue found to be. Suppose, for a moment, that the regulations governing men were now reversed so that they fostered and protected vice, and punished and suppressed virtue; what a monstrous, inhuman condition of affairs it would be! Whose purity, property, honor, or good name would be secure? Indeed, who could gain wealth or a good name under such conditions? So, then, whether experience has taught men that virtue is a necessity of civilization, or whether virtue is imbedded in the very constitution of nature, still the one great fact confronts us, that in order to gain a success at all worthy of the name, we must be virtuous, that is, righteous, for that is the same thing. And it is because they ignore this fundamental fact of nature that so many men in every decade are financially and morally ruined.

Listen to this true recital. On the fourteenth day of September, 1836, at Port Richmond, Staten Island, an old man lay dying. He was desolate, friendless, hopeless, and poor, so poor as to have been in his last years dependent on the charity of a

Scotch woman who had known him in other days. Yet, this man had been born to fortune and to fame, for his father was a man of wealth and large attainments. But few, if any, young men have ever had better opportunities for obtaining eminent success. Nature had endowed this man with all her finest gifts. He was so brilliant of intellect as to be fitted to enter Prince

ton College at eleven years of age. His father had been president of that institution, and was one of the foremost men of his time, whether as educator, scholar, author, or preacher. His mother was the noblest daughter of the most renowned clergyman New England ever produced. His sister had, while living, been the wife of one of the chief justices of Connecticut, and this dying, forsaken old man had himself once been vice-president of the United States, and he might easily have been its president, honored and honorable in life and in death, if he had not despised the law of righteousness, and substituted intrigue and an iron will for moral principles wherewith to guide his life.

Do you ask how came he, who had been so nobly born, to make so fearful a mistake? He had stood one time at the parting of ways where God calls men, and another man had directed him wrong. It happened on this wise: When a student in college at the age of fifteen, his soul was greatly stirred by a religious revival then sweeping over the place, and the president of the college, to whom he went for advice in the hour of his soul's need, had called the religious fervor "fanaticism"; and, when still unsatisfied, some months later, he again sought instruction of another noted divine, similar advice was given him, and he believed them, and then Aaron Burr forsook the faith of his father and mother for the then popular and loose morality of Lord Chesterfield. It was the fruits of this apostasy that led men to distrust the most brilliant lawyer of his day, and caused his own political party to forsake him; and that then led him to seek to retrieve on the "field of honor" (!) his waning political fortunes by taking the life of his rival, Alexander Hamilton, at Weehawken, N. J., on that fatal early morning of July 7th, 1804. And then came in rapid succession his flight for

safety from the wrath of his fellow men; his lurid dreams of an empire, and his long six months' trial for treason, with his after years of wandering in Europe as an outcast among men; and then the years of final recklessness and licentiousness, to the end. Oh, if the finger posts had only pointed right when he stood an awakened lad before Drs. Witherspoon and Bellamy! And yet the man who was so loved by such a daughter as Theodosia Burr could not be wholly bad. Young man, Solomon was right when he declared that "righteousness tendeth to life"; and Paul but wrote nature's law when he said that Godliness "has promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come."

The Dignity of Labor.

REV. JAMES W. COLE, B.D.

NE of the most important facts testified to by human experience in all civilized lands is this-that it is disgraceful

ON

not to work. Men in every age of the world have scorned the idler. They have sought to instruct him by example of industry; they have admonished him by the proverbs of the wise; they have railed at him in song; sought to reform him by law, and yet, like the poor, he is ever with them. Indeed, the poor are mainly his offspring, and, but for him, they would almost disappear from the earth.

The drones in the hive of human industry must needs eat, and so the toilers must produce, not alone for themselves, but for these cumberers of the ground. If labor was not so bounteously rewarded the world would starve, for there is at no time enough food stored within the houses of the earth to support its people for two years without a harvest. Hence the toilers must not only delve, and plant, and reap year after year, whereby to feed and clothe themselves, but they are obliged also to provide for these parasites on the body politic. This class of gentry, whether clothed in purple and fine linen, or decorated with rags, are fond of saying that "the world owes them a living," — an assertion utterly absurd, and wholly untrue. It is bad enough to be a "do-nothing," but why add falsehood to shame by claiming assets never possessed? It is a law of nature that “if any man will not work neither shall he eat." Paul the Apostle did not originate that law. It is imbedded in the very structure of the world.