A 01 - Not a Money-Making Business
NOT A MONEY-MAKING BUSINESS
1. Young men should not enter the ministry to make money. Though this motive should always be secondary, yet it is a legitimate one in considering many other callings.
Wealth is a necessary condition of social welfare and it is therefore needful that some men should make it and even devote their lives to it. But there are other lines of service which are not engaged in the production of wealth and offer little pecuniary attraction. This is generally true of the teaching profession and of philanthropic fields of service, but it is especially true of the ministry.
While it is rightly ordained that they that preach the gospel shall live of the gospel, yet only a plain living is promised and often only a meager living is realized. A few ministers receive generous and even large salaries, but these are exceptional and rare and even these salaries are not relatively large and would not permit the recipients to accumulate wealth.
If a young man were to enter the ministry with a mercenary motive he would not only be bitterly disappointed, but he would vitiate the very root of his ministry. An English art critic has recently lamented the injurious effect of the commercial spirit upon art. * It is difficult, “ he says, “to maintain an ideal in a deal.” The painter who keeps one eye on his canvas and another on the price he hopes to get for it is not likely to do good work. He is not with a single heart intent on producing noble art, but rather on making money, and his mercenary spirit will debase his artist soul. The same principle applies, in a still greater degree to the ministry.
Nothing else more surely blights the spirit and power of a minister than a keen scent for money. His soul is divided between two diverse and incongruous things. It would be hard to associate with Jesus the idea that he was a money-maker. He had not where to lay his head, and in sending out the Twelve he bade them to go unburdened with any money or anxiety about it and charged them, “ Freely ye received, freely give.” No thought of charging for the grace of God was ever to sully and poison their minds, and they were to dispense it without money and without price. The retribution that fell upon Simon the sorcerer, who wanted to buy the gift of the Holy Spirit that he might make money out of it, is a grave warning to any mercenary minister. Not only should the minister not attempt to turn his preaching to profit, but he should devote himself exclusively to his work and not try to mix business with it. If he endeavors to do this he may succeed in making money, but he is not likely to succeed in saving souls. A man may be called to preach the gospel, or he may be called to accumulate wealth, but he is not called to do both at the same time. Peter and Andrew, hearing the call of Jesus, straightway... left the nets, and followed him.” Too many ministers are still burdened with their old boats and tangled up in their old fishing nets. In entering the ministry we should leave boats and nets behind. The young man, then, who is bent on making money should not enter the ministry; and everyone choosing this calling should renounce all effort and thought of getting rich, and devote himself exclusively to it. How ever, the sacrifice is not a serious deterrent, for the loss may be small compared with the gain, and this low motive may be submerged and lost in higher ones. To the ministry in a still greater degree applies the principle which Robert Louis Stevenson applied to the profession of literature in his “Letter to a Young Gentleman Who Proposes to Embraceis], the Career of Art in the following words, “The direct returns the wages of the trade are small, but the indirect the wages of life are infinitely great. No other business offers a man his daily bread upon such joyful terms... Suppose it ill paid; the wonder is it should be paid at all. Other men pay, and pay dearly, for pleasures less desirable.”
William James, the eminent psychologist, took the same view. At the age of twenty one, in a letter to his mother, he wrote: “I feel very much the importance of making soon a final choice of my business in life. I stand now at the place where the road forks.
One branch leads to material comfort, the fleshpots, but it seems a kind of selling of one’s soul. The other to mental dignity and independence, combined, however, with physical penury... I fear there might be some anguish in looking back from the pinnacle of prosperity (necessarily reached, if not by eating dirt, at least by renouncing some divine ambrosia) over the life you might have, led in the pure pursuit of truth. It seems as if one could not afford to give that up for any bribe, however great. “These considerations that were decisive with these eminent literary men should appeal to young men contemplating the ministry as one of its attractions.