The Necessity of Labor—Francis Wayland (1796 – 1865)

Francis Wayland spent most of his career as the president of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. When a call to the ministry cut short his plans to study medicine, Wayland entered Andover Seminary. However, a lack of funds forced him to become a tutor at Union College instead. A few years later he took the pastorate of Boston’s First Baptist Church before returning to academia at Union College and, finally, Brown.

Wayland influenced a generation of students with his textbooks that used philosophical principles to support evangelical thought. In the following quotation, taken from The Elements of Political Economy, Wayland pressed home the simple point that God designed men and women to work.

Labor has been made necessary to the attainment of the means of happiness. No valuable object of desire can be procured without it. Intellectual power cannot be obtained without intellectual discipline; nor a knowledge of the laws of nature, without study. Neither physical comforts, nor even physical necessaries, can be obtained, unless labor [is] first expended to procure them. The universal law of our existence is, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread.”¹

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