this is because neither the one nor the other have any 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 the greatest possible amount of time for attending to the other main business of our life.  And there are others who, rising somewhat above this conception of the work of our civil occupation, a conception which is economical rather than ethical, attain to an esthetic conception and sense of it, and this involves endeavouring to acquire distinction and renown in our occupation, the converting of it into an art for art’s sake, for beauty’s sake.  But it is necessary to rise still higher than this, to attain to an ethical sense of our civil calling, to a sense which derives from our religious sense, from our hunger of eternalization.  To work at our ordinary civil occupation, with eyes fixed on God, for the love of God, which is equivalent to saying for the love of our eternalization, is to make of this work a work of religion.