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   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   In 1857 James Waddel Alexander, prominent Presbyterian minister and   
   former professor at what is now Rutgers University, and later at   
   Princeton Seminary, spearheaded the publication of a short work called   
   The Man of Business Considered in His Various Relations that collected   
   essays and sermons from other prominent Presbyterians on the   
   relationship between Christian piety and the growing number of   
   self-identified businessmen in the antebellum United States. Waddel   
   and his co-authors recognized that capitalism and the United States   
   burgeoning industrial economy had made the businessman a far more   
   common type than he had been at the beginning of the Nineteenth   
   Century.   
      
   The essays in The Man of Business, according to the authors, intended   
   to bear upon a very important class of the community-a class which in   
   this country is constantly increasing.” Elite scholars like Alexander   
   and his comrades perceived the rise of the businessmen to a   
   significant enough phenomena to warrant the church speaking to   
   publicly. “The walks of business become more ramified and extended, as   
   the luxuries of civilization and the skill of human inventions become   
   more multiplied and more widely displayed.” The new and varied   
   commercial, mechanical, and executive businesses, “excited and created   
   by the new wants and new imaginations of advancing society, will call   
   for the creation and extension of new agencies to accomplish the   
   labors which they must demand.” The Presbyterians ministers had no   
   doubt that “the variety and number of business agencies of every kind   
   must spread out in a constant increase. The earnestness of competition   
   and the fertility of invention which characterize the walks of trade   
   will also encroach more and more upon the previous comparative   
   tranquility of professional life.” No social or cultural force,   
   limited the influence and expansion of usiness-mindedness and other   
   aspects of capitalist life on the still-largely Protestant society of   
   the United States. “Men of all descriptions,” the clerics warned,   
   “will, to a great degree, be transformed into business men.”   
   Businessmen’s “temptations, their principles of action, their rules of   
   enterprise, their responsibilities, and their peculiar aspects of   
   influence, will become, to a great degree, the common aspects of the   
   community of which, in earlier times, they have formed only a part.”   
      
   Read it all here:   
      
      
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   --   
   Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa   
   Web:  http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm   
   Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com   
      
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