but feels to be his. It engages his utmost efforts.
It is labor for his wife and children and for all his group fellows, and
therefore is involved in his holiest, most self-forgetting feelings. It
takes him back to his parents and reminds him constantly of his
ancestors. He forms his ideas of justice in his economic experiences.
His ultimate conviction as to the goodness or the badness of the world
are the outgrowth of his experience in getting a living. Therefore his
economic life is his wrestle with nature and with society. It generates
in him all the religion he has.

I suppose it was for this reason that Jesus said "I am come that they
may have life, and that they may have it abundantly." Probably his
meaning was economic, in part, in the saying, "Man shall not live by
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God."
The quest of a living is a satisfaction of successive economic wants, of
which bread is but the first. Every truth that mankind knows involves
men in an economic want. Education is one of the most general wants. It
comes in the series somewhat later than bread. The love of music is an
economic want, which comes generally later than education. But both are
a part of a living. I believe that the quest of education and the love
of music are religious, just as much as the desire for daily bread. One
might enumerate the whole series of economic wants, to satisfy which is
to live, but religion is the total of the reflections, and the complex
of customs which result from the lifelong quest for a living among
common folk. At its highest it is expressed by St. Augustine, "O God,
thou hast made us for thyself, and our souls are not at rest until we
find ourselves in thee." Bread is the first economic want, and God is
the greatest and the last.

Economic wants among common folk are usually the source of religious
feeling. Few people desire to be rich; a lesser number strive to get
wealth; and very few attain a fortune. The most of men seek and get a
living. The best of men, and the most religious, are those whose
economic experience brings them a series of satisfactions, beginning
with bread, clothing, shelter, education in the essentials, music and a
little aesthetic culture, and gradually extending into higher forms of
human enjoyment. The simplest religious craving is for economic
assurance of supply. "The Lord is my Shepherd: I shall not want," is on
the most thumbed page of the Bible.