B 03 - A Useful Work

A USEFUL WORK

3. The ministry is good or useful. This is another standard by which we evaluate the worth of things. Any thought or deed that is not good is evil and is a seed of decay and death. Any business that is not useful is worthless and wasteful and is likely to be wicked. The liquor traffic fell under condemnation on the ground of its being a vast waste and damage to society, and so it had to go. There are still other businesses, such as gambling, that are wholly harmful and contain no atom of good. Young men in choosing a calling should test it by this standard, and if it fulfills no useful end, if it renders no worthy service in the world, it is a bad business and should be avoided. The ministry is good and useful in the highest sense and degree, as it preaches and applies the gospel that is profitable for all things and has in it the promise of the life that now is as well as of that which is to come. It is ever the higher that lifts the lower, the soul that transforms and transfigures the body, and knowledge raises the level of all life. Ideas rule the world; science secretes civilization. The gospel proclaims the most practical and powerful truth in relation to human welfare, and wherever this truth shines there the world is brightest and life rises to the highest forms and bears the finest fruit.

Some misguided or prejudiced minds may look on the minister as a nonproducer and parasite in society, but any such view and charge is wholly unfounded and false. The thinker is a producer as certainly as the farmer and the manufacturer, and the artist not less than the artisan. Indeed, it is the thinker that fertilizes the world with pregnant ideas which are the seeds of all our progress, without which the world would be a barren soil. Newton did not leave any money or magic machine to the world, but he left it ideas that have enormously increased all its wealth. The minister has no cause to fear this charge and need not be ashamed to look the physical toiler in the face, for he himself is a producer of the richest goods of life and of the most essential health and wealth of the soul, the very bread of life; and therefore his calling bears upon it the justification of the supremely useful and good.