y religious sense of
their social function. Neither of them seek to make themselves
irreplaceable. The evil is aggravated when the business takes the
unhappy form of the impersonal limited company, for where there is no
longer any personal signature there is no longer any of that pride which
seeks to give the signature prestige, a pride which in its way is a
substitute for the craving for eternalization. With the disappearance of
the concrete individuality, the basis of all religion, the religious
sense of the business calling disappears also.

And what has been said of employers and workmen applies still more to
members of the liberal professions and public functionaries. There is
scarcely a single servant of the State who feels the religious bearing
of his official and public duties. Nothing could be more unsatisfactory,
nothing more confused, than the feeling among our people with regard to
their duties towards the State, and this sense of duty is still further
obliterated by the attitude of the Catholic Church, whose action so far
as the State is concerned is in strict truth anarchical. It is no
uncommon thing to find among its ministers upholders of the moral
lawfulness of smuggling and contraband as if in disobeying the legally
constituted authority the smuggler and contrabandist did not sin against
the Fourth Commandment of the law of God, which in commanding us to
honour our father and mother commands us to obey all lawful authority in
so far as the ordinances of such authority are not contrary (and the
levying of these contributions is certainly not contrary) to the law of
God.

There are many who, since it is written "In the sweat of thy face shalt
thou eat bread," regard work as a punishment, and therefore they
attribute merely an economico-political, or at best an esthetic, value
to the work of everyday life. For those who take this view--and it is
the view principally held by the Jesuits--the business of life is
twofold: there is the inferior and transitory business of winning a
livelihood, of winning bread for ourselves and our children in an
honourable, manner--and the elasticity of this honour is well known; and
there is the grand business of our salvation, of winning eternal glory.
This inferior or worldly business is to be undertaken not only so as to
permit us, without deceiving or seriously injuring our neighbours, to
live decently in accordance with our social position, but also so as to
afford us