nciple of success in
business are both the same precisely. The man who says, "I cannot
carry my religion into business" advertises himself either as being an
imbecile in business, or on the road to bankruptcy, or a thief, one of
the three, sure. He will fail within a very few years. He certainly will
if he doesn't carry his religion into business. If I had been carrying
on my father's store on a Christian plan, godly plan, I would have had
a jack-knife for the third man when he called for it. Then I would have
actually done him a kindness, and I would have received a reward myself,
which it would have been my duty to take.

There are some over-pious Christian people who think if you take any
profit on anything you sell that you are an unrighteous man. On the
contrary, you would be a criminal to sell goods for less than they cost.
You have no right to do that. You cannot trust a man with your money who
cannot take care of his own. You cannot trust a man in your family that
is not true to his own wife. You cannot trust a man in the world that
does not begin with his own heart, his own character, and his own life.
It would have been my duty to have furnished a jack-knife to the third
man, or the second, and to have sold it to him and actually profited
myself. I have no more right to sell goods without making a profit on
them than I have to overcharge him dishonestly beyond what they are
worth. But I should so sell each bill of goods that the person to whom I
sell shall make as much as I make.

To live and let live is the principle of the gospel, and the principle
of every-day common sense. Oh, young man, hear me; live as you go along.
Do not wait until you have reached my years before you begin to enjoy
anything of this life. If I had the millions back, or fifty cents of it,
which I have tried to earn in these years, it would not do me anything
like the good that it does me now in this almost sacred presence
to-night. Oh, yes, I am paid over and over a hundredfold to-night for
dividing as I have tried to do in some measure as I went along through
the years. I ought not speak that way, it sounds egotistic, but I am old
enough now to be excused for that. I should have helped my fellow-men,
which I have tried to do, and every one should try to do, and get the
happiness of it. The man who goes home with the sense that he has stolen
a dollar that day, that he has robbed a man of what was his honest due,
is not going to sweet r