316. Business Troubles

Business Troubles

Eze_27:24 : ’93These were thy merchants in all sorts of things.’94

We are at the opening door of returning national prosperity. The coming crops, the re-establishment of public confidence, and, above all, the blessing of God, will turn in upon all sections of America the widest, greatest prosperity this country has ever seen. But that door of successes is not yet fully open, and thousands of business men are yet suffering from the most distressing times through which we have been passing.

Some of the best men in the land have faltered; men whose hearts are enlisted in every good work, and whose hands have blessed every great charity. The Church of God can afford to extend to them her sympathies, and plead before heaven with all-availing prayer. The schools such men have established, the churches they have built, the asylums and beneficent institutions they have fostered, will be their eulogy long after their banking institutions are forgotten. Such men can never fail. They have their treasures in banks that never break, and they will be millionaires forever. But I thought it would be appropriate, today, and useful, for me to talk about the trials and temptations of our business men, and try to offer some curative prescriptions.

In the first place, I have to remark that a great many of our business men feel ruinous trials and temptations coming to them from small and limited capital. It is everywhere understood that it takes now three or four times as much capital to do business well as once it did. Once, a few hundred dollars were turned into goods’97the merchant would be his own store-sweeper, his own salesman, his own bookkeeper; he would manage all the affairs himself, and the gross profit would be almost net profit. Wonderful changes have come; costly apparatus, extensive advertising, exorbitant store rents, heavy taxation, expensive agencies are only parts of the demand made upon our commercial men; and when they have found themselves in such circumstances with small capital, they have sometimes been tempted to run against the rocks of moral and financial destruction. This temptation born of limited capital has ruined men in two ways. Sometimes they have shrunk down under the temptation. They have yielded the battle before the first shot was fired. At the first hard dun of a creditor they surrendered. Their knees knocked together at the fall of the auctioneer’92s hammer. They blanched at the financial peril. They did not understand that there is such a thing as heroism in merchandise, and that there are Waterloos of the counter, and that a man can fight no braver battle with the sword than he can with the yardstick. Their souls melted in them because sugars were up when they wanted to buy, and down when they wanted to sell, and unsalable goods were on the shelf, and bad debts in their ledger. The gloom of their countenances overshadowed even their dry goods and groceries. Despondency, coming from limited capital, blasted them.

Others have felt it in a different way. They have said: ’93Here I have been trudging along. I have been trying to be honest all these years. I find it is of no use. Now it is make or break.’94 The small craft that could have stood the stream, is put out beyond the lighthouse, on the great sea of speculation. He borrows a few thousand dollars from friends who dare not refuse him, and he goes bartering on a large scale. He reasons in this way: ’93Perhaps I may succeed, and if I don’92t I will be no worse off than I am now, for a hundred thousand dollars taken from nothing, nothing remains.’94 Stocks are the dice with which he gambles. He bought for a few dollars vast tracts of Western land. Some man at the East, living on a fat homestead, meets this gambler of fortune, and is persuaded to trade off his estate for lots in a Western city with large avenues and costly palaces and lake steamers smoking at the wharves and rail-trains coming down with lightning speed from every direction. There it is, all on paper! The city has never been built, nor the railroads constructed, but everything points that way, and the thing will eventually be done as sure as you live. Well, the man goes on, stopping at no fraud or outrage. In his splendid equipage he dashes past, while the honest laborer looks up, and wipes the sweat from his brow and says, ’93I wonder where that man got all his money.’94 After a while the bubble bursts. Creditors rush in. The law clutches, but finds nothing in its grasp. The men who were swindled say: ’93I don’92t know how I could have ever been deceived by that man;’94 and the pictorials, in handsome wood-cuts, set forth the hero who in ten years had genius enough to fail for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

And that is the process by which many have been tempted through limitation of capital, to rush into labyrinths from which they could not be extricated. I would not want to chain honest enterprise. I would not want to block up any of the avenues for honest accumulation that open before young men. On the contrary, I would like to cheer them on, and rejoice when they reach the goal; but when there are such multitudes of men going to ruin for this life and the life that is to come, through wrong notions of what are lawful spheres of enterprise, it is the duty of the Church of God, and the ministers of religion, and the friends of all young men, to utter a plain, emphatic, unmistakable protest. These are the influences that drown men in destruction and perdition.

Again, a great many of our business men are tempted to overanxiety and care. You know that nearly all commercial businesses are overdone in this day. Smitten with the love of quick gain, our cities are crowded with men resolved to be rich at all hazards. They do not care how money comes, if it only comes. Our best merchants are thrown into competition with men of more means and less conscience, and if an opportunity of accumulation be neglected one hour, some one else picks it up. From January to December the struggle goes on. Night gives no quiet to limbs tossing in restlessness, nor to a brain that will not stop thinking. The dreams are harrowed by imaginary loss, and flushed with imaginary gains. Even the Sabbath cannot dam back the tide of anxiety; for this wave of worldliness dashes clear over the churches, and leaves its foam on Bibles and prayer-books. Men who are living on salaries, or by the cultivation of the soil, cannot understand the wear and tear of the body and mind to which our merchants are subjected, when they do not know but that their livelihood and their business honor are dependent upon the uncertainties of the next hour. This excitement of the brain, this corroding care of the heart, this strain of effort that exhausts the spirit, send a great many of our best men, in middle-life, into the grave. Their life dashed out against money safes. They go with their store on their backs. They trudge like camels, sweating, from Aleppo to Damascus. They make their life a crucifixion. Standing behind desks and counters, banished from the fresh air, weighed down by carking cares, they are so many suicides. Oh! I wish I could, today, rub out some of these lines of care; that I could lift some of the burdens from the heart; that I could give relaxation to some of these worn muscles. It is time for you to begin to take it a little easier. Do your best, and then trust God for the rest. Do not fret. God manages all the affairs of your life, and he manages them for the best. Consider the lilies’97they always have robes. Behold the fowls of the air’97they always have nests. Take a long breath. Bethink, betimes, that God did not make you for a pack-horse. Dig yourselves out from among the hogsheads and the shelves, and in the light of the holy Sabbath day resolve that you will give to the winds your fears, and your fretfulness and your distresses. You brought nothing into the world, and it is very certain you can carry nothing out. Having food and raiment, be therewith content.

The merchant came home from the store. There had been a great disaster there. He opened the front door, and said, in the midst of his family circle: ’93I am ruined. Everything is gone. I am utterly ruined.’94 His wife said: ’93I am left;’94 and the little child threw up its hands and said: ’93Papa, I am here.’94 The aged grandmother, seated in the room, said: ’93Then you have all the promises of God beside, John.’94 And he burst into tears, and said: ’93God forgive me, that I have been so ungrateful. I find I have a great many things left. God forgive me.’94

Again I remark, that many of our business men are tempted to neglect their home duties. How often it is that the store and the home seem to clash, but there ought not to be any collision. It is often the case that the father is the mere treasurer of the family, a sort of agent to see that they have dry goods and groceries. The work of family government he does not touch. Once or twice in a year he calls the children up on a Sabbath afternoon, when he has a half-hour he does not exactly know what to do with, and in that half-hour he disciplines the children, and chides them and corrects their faults, and gives them a great deal of good advice, and then wonders all the rest of the year that his children do not do better, when they have the wonderful advantage of that semi-annual castigation.

The family table, which ought to be the place for pleasant discussion and cheerfulness, often becomes the place of perilous haste. If there be any blessing asked at all, it is cut off at both ends, and with the hand on the carving knife. He counts on his fingers, making estimates in the interstices of the repast. The duty done or the repast finished, the hat goes to the head, and he starts down the street, and before the family have arisen from the table, he has bound up another bundle of goods, and says to the customer: ’93Anything more I can do for you today, sir?’94 A man has more responsibilities than those which are discharged by putting competent instructors over his children, and giving them a drawing-master and a music-teacher. The physical culture of the child will not be attended to unless the father looks to it. He must sometimes lose his dignity. He must unlimber his joints. He must sometimes lead them out to their sports and games. The parent who cannot sometimes forget the severe duties of life, to fly the kite and trundle the hoop and chase the ball and jump the rope with his children, ought never to have been tempted out of a crusty and unredeemable solitariness. If you want to keep your children away from places of sin, you can only do it by making your home attractive. You may preach sermons and advocate reforms and denounce wickedness, and yet your children will be captivated by the glittering saloon of sin, unless you can make your home a brighter place than any other place on earth to them. Oh! gather all charms into your house. If you can afford it, bring books and pictures and cheerful entertainments to the household. But, above all, teach those children’97not by half an hour twice a year on the Sabbath day, but day after day, and every day’97teach them that religion is a great gladness, that it puts or hangs chains of gold about the neck, that it takes no spring from the foot, no blithness from the heart, no sparkle from the eye, no ring from the laughter; but that ’93her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.’94 I sympathize with the work being done in many of our cities, by which beautiful rooms are set apart by our Young Men’92s Christian Associations, and I pray God to prosper them in all things. But I tell you there is something back of that and before that: we need more happy, consecrated, cheerful Christian homes everywhere.

Again I remark, that a great many of our business men are tempted to put the attainment of money above the value of the soul. It is a grand thing to have plenty of money. The more you get of it, the better, if it come honestly and go usefully. For the lack of it, sickness dies without medicine, and hunger finds its coffin in the empty bread tray, and nakedness shivers for lack of clothes and fire. When I hear a man uttering canting tirade against money’97a Christian man’97as though it had no possible use on earth, and he had no interest in it at all, I come almost to think that the heaven that would be appropriate for him would be an everlasting poor-house. While, we do admit that there is such a thing as the lawful use of money’97a profitable use of money’97let us recognize also the fact that money cannot satisfy a man’92s soul, that it cannot glitter in the dark valley, that it cannot pay our fare across the Jordan of death, that it cannot unlock the gate of heaven. There are men in all occupations who seem to act as though they thought that a pack of bonds and mortgages could be traded off for a title to heaven, and as though gold would be a lawful tender in that place where it is so common that they make pavements out of it. Salvation by Christ is the only salvation. Treasures in heaven are the only incorruptible treasures.

Have you ever ciphered out in the rule of loss and gain the sum: ’93What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’94 However fine your apparel, the winds of death will flutter it like rags. Homespun and a threadbare coat have sometimes been the shadow of coming robes made white in the blood of the Lamb. The pearl of great price is worth more than any gem you can bring from the ocean, more than Australian or Brazilian mines strung in one carcanet. Seek after God; find his righteousness, and all shall be well here; all shall be well hereafter.

Some of you remember the shipwreck of the Central America. The noble steamer had, I think, about five hundred passengers aboard. Suddenly the storm came, and the surges trampled the decks and swung into the hatches, and there went up a hundred-voiced death-shriek. The foam on the jaw of the wave. The pitching of the steamer as though it were leaping a mountain. The dismal flare of the signal rockets. The long cough of the steam pipes. The hiss of extinguished furnaces. The walking of God on the wave! The steamer went not down without a struggle. As the passengers stationed themselves in rows, to bale out the vessel, hark to the thump of the buckets, as men unused to toil, with blistered hands and strained muscle, tug for their lives. There is a sail seen against the sky. The flash of the distress gun is noticed, its voice heard not, for it is choked in the louder booming of the sea. A few passengers escaped; but the steamer gave one great lurch and was gone! So there are some men who sail on prosperously in life. All’92s well; all’92s well. But at last, some financial disaster comes: a Euroclydon. Down they go! The bottom of the commercial sea is strewn with shattered hulks. But because your property goes, do not let your soul go. Though all else perish, save that; for I have to tell you of a more stupendous shipwreck than that which I just mentioned. God launched this world six thousand years ago. It has been going on under freight of mountains and immortals; but one day it will stagger at the cry of fire. The timbers of rock will burn, the mountains flame like masts, and the clouds like sails in the Judgment hurricane. Then God shall take the passengers off the deck, and from the berths those who have long been asleep in Jesus, and he will set them far beyond the reach of storm and peril. But how many shall go down will never be known, until it shall be announced one day in heaven; the shipwreck of a world! So many millions saved! So many millions lost! O my dear hearers! whatever you lose, though your houses go, though your lands go, though all your earthly possessions perish, may God Almighty, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, save all your souls.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage