n when they will no
longer be compelled to work, are apt to be sticklers for Sabbath-keeping
and church-going.

Gentlemen in business who give eleven for a dozen, and count thirty-four
inches a yard, who are quick to foreclose a mortgage, and who say
"business is business," generally are vestrymen, deacons and church
trustees. Look about you! Predaceous real estate dealers who set nets
for all the unwary, lawyers who lie in wait for their prey, merchant
princes who grind their clerks under the wheel, and oil magnates whose
history was never written, nor could be written, often make peace with
God, and find a gratification for their sense of sublimity by building
churches, founding colleges, giving libraries, and holding firmly to a
formalized religion. Look about you!

To recapitulate: if your life-work is doubtful, questionable or
distasteful, you will hold the balance true by going outside your
vocation for the gratification that is your due, but which your daily
work denies, and you find it in religion, I do not say this is always
so, but it is very often. Great sinners are apt to be very religious;
and conversely, the best men who have ever lived have been at war with
established religions. And further, the best men are never found
in churches.

Men deeply immersed in their work, whose lives are consecrated to doing
things, who are simple, honest and sincere, desire no formal religion,
need no priest nor pastor, and seek no gratification outside their daily
lives. All they ask is to be let alone--they wish only the privilege
to work.

When Samuel Johnson, on his death bed, made Joshua Reynolds promise he
would do no more work on Sunday, he of course had no conception of the
truth that Reynolds reached through work the same condition of mind that
he, Johnson, had reached by going to church. Johnson despised work and
Reynolds loved it; Johnson considered one day in the week holy; to
Reynolds all days were sacred--sacred to work; that is, to the
expression of his best. Why should you cease to express your holiest and
highest on Sunday? Ah, I know why you don't work on Sunday! It is
because you think that work is degrading, and because your sale and
barter is founded on fraud, and your goods are shoddy. Your week-day
dealings lie like a pall upon your conscience, and you need a day in
which to throw off the weariness of that slavery under which you live.
You are not free yourself, and you insist that others shall n