God; but I do know that upon Christian merchants and Christian brokers and Christian lawyers and Christian men in business to-day there rests an awful and a beautiful responsibility:  to prove, if you can prove it, that these things are capable of being made divine, to prove that a man can do the work that you have been doing this morning and will do this afternoon, and yet shall love his God and his fellow-man as himself.  If he cannot, if he cannot, what business have you to be doing them?  If he can, what business have you to be doing them so poorly, so carnally, so unspiritually, that men look on them and shake their heads with doubt?  It belongs to Christ in men first to prove that man may be a Christian and yet do business; and, in the second place, to show how a man, as he becomes a greater Christian, shall purify and lift the business that he does and make it the worthy occupation of the Son of God.

What shall be our universal law of life?  Can we give it as we draw toward our last moment?  I think we can.  I want to live, I want to live, if God will give me help, such a life that, if all men in the world were living it, this world would be regenerated and saved.  I want to live such a life that, if that life changed into new personal peculiarities as it went to different men, but the same life still, if every man were living it, the millennium would be here; nay, heaven would be here, the universal presence of God.  Are you living that life now?  Do you want your life multiplied by the thousand million so that all men shall be like you, or don’t you shudder at the thought, don’t you give hope that other men are better than you are?  Keep that fear, but only that it may be the food of a diviner hope, that all the world may see in you the thing that man was meant to be, that is, the Christ.  Ah, you say, that great world, it is too big; how can I stretch my thought and imagination and conscience to the poor creatures in Africa and everywhere?  Then bring it home.  Ah, this dear city of ours, this city that we love, this city in which many of us were born, in which all of us are finding the rich and sweet associations of our life, this city, whose very streets we love because they come so close to everything we do and are, cannot we do something for it?  Cannot we make its life diviner?  Cannot we contribute something that it has not to-day?  Cannot you put in it, some little corner of it, a life which others shall see and say, “Ah, that our lives may be like that!” And then the good Boston in which we so rejoice, which we so love, which we would so fain make a part of the kingdom of God, a true city of Jesus Christ, we shall not die without having done something for it.