CONTENTS TO VOL. VII. PAGE I. A SERMON OF MERCHANTS. PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER, 22, 1846. "As a nail sticketh fast between the joinings of the stones; so doth sin stick close between buying and selling."-ECCLES. xxvii. 2. I ASK your attention to a "Sermon of Merchants: their Position, Temptations, Opportunities, Influence, and Duty." For the present purpose, men may be distributed into four classes. I. Men who create new material for human use, either by digging it out of mines and quarries, fishing it out of the sea, or raising it out of the land. These are direct producers. II. Men who apply their head and hands to this material, and transform it into other shapes, fitting it for human use; men that make grain into flour and bread, cotton into cloth, iron into needles or knives, and the like. These are indirect producers; they create not the material, but its fitness, use, or beauty. They are manufacturers. III. Men who simply use these things, when thus produced and manufactured. They are consumers. IV. Men who buy and sell: who buy to sell, and sell to buy the more. They fetch and carry between the other classes. These are distributors; they are the merchants. Under this name I include the whole class who live by buying and selling, and not merely those conventionally called merchants, to distinguish them from small dealers. This term comprises traders behind counters and traders behind desks; traders neither behind counters nor desks. There are various grades of merchants. They might be VOL. VII. B classed and symbolized according as they use a basket, a wheelbarrow, a cart, a stall, a booth, a shop, a warehouse, counting-room, or bank. Still all are the same thingmen who live by buying and selling. A ship is only a large basket, a warehouse a costly stall. Your pedler is a small merchant going round from house to house with his basket to mediate between persons; your merchant only a great pedler sending round from land to land with his ships to mediate between nations. The Israelitish woman who sits behind a bench in her stall on the Rialto at Venice, changing gold into silver and copper, or loaning money to him who leaves hat, coat, and other collaterals in pledge, is a small banker. The Israelitish man who sits at Frankfort-on-the-Maine, changes drafts into specie, and lends millions to men who leave in pledge a mortgage on the States of the Church, Austria or Russia -is a pawnbroker and money-changer on a large scale. By this arithmetic, for present convenience, all grades of merchants are reduced to one denomination-men who live by buying and selling. All these four classes run into one another. The same man may belong to all at the same time. All are needed. At home a merchant is a mediator to go between the producer and the manufacturer; between both and the consumer. On a large scale he is a mediator who goes between continents, between producing and manufacturing States, between both and consuming countries. The calling is founded in the state of society, as that in a compromise between man's permanent nature and transient condition. So long as there are producers and consumers, there must be distributors. The value of the calling depends on its importance; its usefulness is the measure of its respectability. The most useful calling must be the noblest. If it is difficult, demanding great ability and self-sacrifice, it is yet more noble. A useless calling is disgraceful; one that injures mankind-infamous. Tried by this standard, the producers seem nobler than the distributors; they than the mere consumers. This may not be the popular judgment now, but must one day become so, for mankind is slowly learning to judge by the natural law published by Jesus-that he who would be greatest of all, must be most effectively the servant of all. |