The Sacredness of the Commonplace Calling

The lowliest, the most commonplace earthly calling may still be a sacred vocation, rich in service, full of blessing both to you and your fellow-men. We read D’Aubigné’s history of the Reformation with glistening eyes and bated breath as we follow the dramatic episodes and hairbreadth escapes of Martin Luther in his struggles against Rome; but it is an open question whether that little man fiddling about with a few wooden blocks in that little German workshop and inventing the art of printing did not do more to establish the Reformation than even the great Luther himself.

We read with throbbing breasts the story of the wars of the Roses, and delight to visit the places where those epoch-making battles took place; but the effect of those dread conflicts on the history of Yorkshire and Lancashire and England was as nothing compared to the changes wrought by that simple working-man who invented the spinning-mill. We are proud of the prison philanthropist John Howard and Wilberforce and Florence Nightingale, but the services rendered to mankind by those were not greater, were not anything like so great, as the services rendered by that patient, unknown chemist who taught humanity the use of anaesthetics.

The man who cut the Suez Canal, or tunnelled the Alps, or gave us the telegraph, did quite as much for human brotherhood and the unity of the race as some of the social champions we delight to honour. To maintain an honest business is noble; to do the humdrum mercenary business of life in a proper spirit is to serve your God and your generation.