Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

THE NECKS OF THE WICKED

A letter lies before me, one out of many others asking me how the author of "The Shadow Christ," which is a study of the religious values in suffering and self-sacrifice in this world, takes the low ground that honesty is the best policy.

I know two kinds of men who believe that honesty is the best policy.

These two men use exactly the same words "Honesty is the best policy."

One man says it.

The other man sings it.

One man is honest because it pays.

The other man is honest because he likes it.

"Honesty is the best policy" as a motive cannot be called religious, but "Honesty is the best policy" as a Te Deum, as something a man sings in his heart every day about God, something he sings about human nature is religious, and believing it the way some men believe it, is an act of worship.

It is like a great gentle mass.

It is like taking softly up one's own planet and offering it to God.

Here it is—the planet. Honesty is organized in the rocks on it and in the oak trees on it and in the people. The rivers flow to the sea and the heart of Man flows to God. On this one planet, at least, God is a success.

The first objection which they put forward to the Golden Rule is that it is a failure.

When I try to deal with this or try to tell them about Non-Gregarious, the second objection that they put forward is, that it is a success.

If they cannot discourage me with one of these objections they try to discourage me with the other.

They point to the Cross.

Some days I cannot help wondering what Christ would think if He were to come back and find people, all these good Christian people everywhere using the Cross—the Cross of all things in the world as an objection to the Golden Rule and to its working properly, or as a general argument against expecting anything of anybody.

I do not know that I have any philosophy about it that would be of any value to others.

I only know that I am angry all through when I hear a certain sort of man saying, and apparently proving, that the Golden Rule does not work.

And I am angry at other people who are listening with me because they are not angry too.

Why are people so complacent about crosses? And why are they willing to keep on having and expecting to have in this world all the good people on crosses? Why do they keep on treating these crosses year after year, century after century, in a dull tired way as if they had become a kind of conventionality of God's, a kind of good old church custom, something that He and the Church by this time, after two thousand years, could not really expect to try to get over or improve upon?

I do not know that I ought to feel as I do.

It comes up against my will.

My will, so far as it goes, is a spiritual fact.

I do not argue about it, nor do I know that I wish to justify it. I merely accept my will as it is, as one spiritual fact.

I propose to know what to do with it next.

The first thing that I have done, of course, has been to find out that there are millions of other so-called Christian people who have encountered this same fact that I have encountered.

There are at least some of us who stand together. Our wills are set against having any more people die on crosses in this world than can be helped. If there is any kind of skill, craftmanship, technique, psychology, knowledge of human nature which can be brought to bear, which will keep the best people in this world not only from being, but from belonging on crosses in it, we propose to bring these things to bear. We are not willing to believe that crowds are not inclined to Goodness. We are not willing to slump down on any general slovenly assumption about the world that goodness cannot be made to work in it.

If goodness is not efficient in this world we will make it efficient.

Our reason for saying this is that we honestly glory in this world. We believe that at this moment while we are still on it, it is in the act of being a great world, that it is God's world, and in God's Name we will defend its reputation.

We do not deny that it may be better spiritual etiquette, more heroic looking and may have a certain moral grace, so far as a man himself is concerned, if the world makes him suffer for being honest. But after all he is only one man, and whether he dislikes his suffering or likes it and feels fine and spiritual over it, it is only one man's suffering.

Is not the fact that a whole world, eternal and innumerable, is supposed to be such a mean, dishonest sort of a world that it will make a man suffer for being good a more important fact than the man's suffering is? It seems to me to be taking not lower but higher ground when one insists on believing in the race one belongs to and in believing that it is a human race that can be believed in. After two thousand years of Christ, it is a lazy, tired, anæmic slander on the world to believe that it does not pay to be good in it. The man who believes it, and acts as if he believed it, is to-day and has been from the beginning of time the supreme enemy of us all. He is guilty before heaven and before us all and in all nations of high treason to the human race. One of the next most important things to do in modern religion is going to be to get all these morally dressed-up, noble-looking people who enjoy feeling how good they are because they have failed, to examine their hearts, stop enjoying themselves and think.

David had a manly, downright belief. His belief was that if sin is allowed to get to the top in this world of ours, it is our fault. David felt that it was partly his—and being a king—very much his, and as he was trying to do something about it, he naturally wanted the world to help.

What he really meant—what lay in the background of his petition—the real spirit that made him speak out in that naïve bold way before the Lord, and before everybody—that made him ask the great God in heaven all looking so white and so indifferent, to come right down please and jump on the necks of the wicked, was a vivid, live vision of his own for his own use that he was going to make the world more decent. He was spirited about it. If God did not, He would, and naturally when he came to expressing how he felt in prayer, he wanted God to stand by him. To put it in good plain soldier-like Hebrew, He wanted God to jump on the necks of his enemies.

Speaking strictly for ourselves, in our more modern spirit of course, we would want to modulate this, we admit that we would not ask God to do a little thing like jumping on the necks of the wicked—just for us—nor would we care to break away from the other things we are doing and attend to it ourselves, nor would we even favour their necks being jumped on by others, but while we do not agree with David's particular request, we do profoundly agree with the way he felt when he made it. We would not make our flank movement on the wicked in quite the same way and according to our more modern and more scientific manner of thought, we would want to do something more practical with the wicked, but we would want to do something with them and we would want to do it now.

We have made up our minds to live in a world not where the wicked will feel that their necks are going to be jumped on (which is really a rather interesting and prominent feeling on the whole), but a world where the wicked will be made to feel that nobody notices their necks, that they are not worth being jumped on, a world where nobody will have time to go out back and jump on them, a world where the wicked will not be able to think of anything important to do, and where the wicked things that are left to do will be so small and so stupid that nobody will notice. They will be ignored like boys with catcalls in the street. When we can make people who do wrong feel unimportant enough, there is going to be some chance for the good.

If we could find some sweet, proper, gentle, Christian-looking way of conveying to these people for a few swift, keen minutes how little difference it makes when they and people like them do wrong, they would steal over in a body and do right.

This is our program. We are making preliminary arrangements for a world in which after this, very soon now, righteousness is going to attend strictly to its own business and unrighteousness is going to be crowded out. No one will feel that he has time in two or three hundred years from now to go out of his way into some obscure corner of the world and jump on the necks of the wicked.

The old hymn with which many of us are familiar is well and true enough. But it does not seem that standing up for Jesus is the most important point in the world just now. A great many people are doing it. What we need more is people who will stand up for the world. When people who are standing up for the world stand and sing "Stand up for Jesus" it will begin to count. Let four hundred Nons sing it; and we will all go to church.

If nine of the people out of ten who are singing "Stand up for Jesus" would stand up for the world, that is, if they would stop trading with their grocer when they find he slides in regularly one bad orange out of twelve and promptly look up a grocer who does not do such things, and trade with him, it would not be necessary for people to do as they so often do nowadays, fall back on a little wistful half discouraged last resort like "standing up for Jesus."

The idea that goodness is sweet and helpless and that Jesus was meek and lowly and has to be stood up for is now and always has been a slander. It does not seem to some of us that He would want to be stood up for and we do not like the way some people call Him meek and lowly. It would be more true to say that He merely looks meek and lowly; that is, if most men had done or not done or had said or not said things in the way he did, they would have been considered meek and lowly for it. He had a way of using a soft answer to turn away wrath. But there was not anything really meek and lowly about his giving the soft answer. No meek and lowly man would ever have thought of such a thing as turning away wrath with a soft answer. He would have been afraid of looking weak. He would not have had the energy or the honesty or the spiritual address to know or to think of a soft answer that would do it.

The spirit of fighting evil with good—a kind of glorious self-will for goodness, for doing a thing the higher and nobler way and making it work, the spirit of successful implacably efficient righteousness is the last and most modern interpretation of the New Testament, the crowd's latest cry to its God. Crowds will always crucify and crosses will never go by. But we are going to have a higher ideal for crosses. We are not going (out of sheer shame for the world), to think seriously any longer of dying on a cross, or letting any one else die on one for a little rudimentary platitude, a quiet, sensible, everyday business motto for any competent business man like "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE SUCCESSFUL?

We are having and are about to have notably and truly successful men who have the humility and faithfulness, the spiritual distinction of true and great success.

I want to interpret, if I can, these men. I would like to put with the great martyrs, with the immortal heroes of failure, these modern silent, unspoken, unsung mighty men, the heroes of success. I look forward to seeing them placed among the trophies of religion, in the heart of mankind at last.

I cannot stand by and watch these men being looked upon by good people as men the New Testament made no room for, secretly disapproved of by religious men and women, as being successes, as being little, noisy, disturbing, contradictions of the New Testament as talking back to the Cross.

These things I have been trying to say about the Cross as a means of expressing goodness to crowds have brought me as time goes on into close quarters with many men to whom I pay grateful tribute, men of high spirit, who strenuously disagree with me.

I am not content unless I can find common ground with men like these.

Perhaps failure is not the only way.

When I was talking with —— a little while ago about Non-Gregarious's goodness and how it succeeded, he was afraid that if his goodness succeeded there must have been something the matter with it.

I could see that he was wondering what it was.

Non's success troubled him. He did not think it was exactly religious. "Real religion" he said, "was self-sacrifice. There always had to be something of the Cross about real religion."

I said that Non's religion was touched at every point with the Cross.

It seemed to me that it was the spirit of eagerness in it that was the great thing about the Cross. If Non would all but have died to make the Golden Rule work in this world, if he daily faced ruin and risked the loss of everything he had in this life to prove that the Golden Rule was a success, that is if he really had a Cross and if he really faced it—dying on it, or not dying on it, could not have made him one whit more religious or less religious than he was. What Non was willing to die for, was his belief in the world, and scores of good Christian people tried in those early days of his business struggle to keep him from believing in the world. There was hardly a day at first but some good Christian would step into Non's office and tell him the world would make him suffer for it if he kept on recklessly believing in it and doing all those unexpected, unconventional, honest things that somehow, apparently, he could not help doing.

They all told him he could not succeed. They said he was a failure. He would suffer for it.

I would like to express if I can, what seems to be Non's point of view toward success and failure.

Probably if we had crosses to-day the hard part of dying on one would be, not dying on it, but thinking while one was dying on it that one was in the sort of world that could do such things.

It is Non's religion not to believe every morning as he goes down to his office that he is in a mean world, a world that would want to crucify him for doing his work as well as he could.

Perhaps this was the spirit of the first Cross, too. We have every reason to believe that if Christ could have come back in the flesh three days after the crucifixion and lived thirty-three years longer in it, he would have occupied himself exclusively in standing up for the world that had crucified him, in saying that it was a small party in a small province that did it, that it was temporary and that they did it because they were in a hurry.

It was not Christ, but the comparatively faint-believing, worldly minded saints that have enjoyed dying on crosses since, who have been proud of being martyrs.

Doubtless very often people on crosses really have been holier than the people who knew how to be good without being crucified. Sometimes it has been the other way. It would have been just as holy in Non to make the gospel work in New York as to make a blaze, a show or advertisement of how wicked the world was, and of how inefficient the gospel was—by going into insolvency.

He has had his cross, but instead of dying on it, he has taken it up and carried it. Scores of risks and difficulties that he has grappled with would have become crosses at once if equally good, but less resourceful men, had had them. Letting one's self be threatened with the cross a thousand times is quite as brave as dying on one once. The spirit, or at least the shadow, of a cross must always fall daily on any life that is stretching the world, that is freeing the lives of other men against their wills. The whole issue of whether there will be a cross or the threat of a cross turns on a man's insight into human nature and his quiet and practical imagination concentrated upon his work.

Not dying on a cross is a matter of technique. One sees how not to, and one does not. It might be said that the world has two kinds of redeemers, its cross-redeemers and its success-redeemers. The very best are on crosses, many of them. Perhaps in the development of the truth the cross-redeemers come first; they are the pioneers. Then come the success-redeemers, then everybody!

IS IT SECOND RATE FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE SUCCESSFUL?

Of course the most stupendous success that has ever been made—the world's most successful undertaking from a technical point of view as an adaptation of means to ends was the attempt that was made by a man in Galilee years and years ago to get not only the attention of a whole world, but to get the attention of a whole world for two thousand years.

This purpose of arresting the attention of a world and of holding it for two thousand years was accomplished by the use of success and of failure alternately.

Christ tried success or failure according to which method (time and place considered) would seem to work best.

His first success was with the doctors.

His next success was based on His instinct for psychology, His power of divining people's minds, which made possible to Him those extraordinary feats in the way of telling short stories that would arrest and hold the attention of crowds so that they would think and live with them for weeks to come.

His next success was a success based on the power of His personality, and His knowledge of the human spirit and his victory over His own spirit—his success in curing people's diseases and His extraordinary roll of miracles.

He finally tried failure at the end, or what looked like failure, because the Cross completed what he had had to say.

It made His success seem greater.

The world had put to death the man who had had such great successes.

But the Cross itself, or the use of failure was a sowing of the seed, a taking the truth out of the light and the sunshine and putting it in the dark ground.

The Cross was promptly contradicted with the Resurrection. All this, it seems to some of us, is the most stupendous and successful undertaking from a purely technical point of view that the world has seen. In the last analysis it was not His ideas or His character merely, but it was His technique that made Christ the Son of God and the Master of the Nations of the Earth.

I think that while Christ would not have understood Frederick Taylor's technique, his tables of figures or foot-tons or logarithms he would have understood Frederick Taylor.

Nearly all the time that could be said to have been spent in his life in dealing with other men he spent in doing for them on a nobler scale the thing that Frederick Taylor did. He went up to men—to hundreds of men a day, that he saw humdrumming along, despising themselves and despising their work and expecting nothing of themselves and nothing of any one else and asked them to put their lives in his hands and let him show what could be done with them.

This is Frederick Taylor's profession.

The Sermon on the Mount began with telling people that they would be successful if they knew how—if they had a vision. It proceeded to give them the vision. It began with giving them a vision for the things that they had, told them how even the very things that they had always thought before were what was the matter with the world they could make a great use of. "Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those that hunger; blessed are the meek."

As human nature then was and in the then spirit of the world, no better means than a Cross could have been employed to get the attention of all men, to make a two thousand year advertisement for all nations of what a success human nature was, of what men really could be like.

But I think that if Christ were to come to us again and if he were to try to get the attention of the whole world once more to precisely the same ideas and principles that he stood for before, the enterprise would be conducted in a very different manner.

There is a picture of Albert Durer's which hangs near my desk, and once more as I write these lines my eyes have fallen on it. It is the familiar one with the lion and the lamb in it, lying down together, and with the big room with the implements of knowledge scattered about in it and at the other end in the window at the table with a book, an old, bent-over scientist with a halo over his head.

If Christ were to appear suddenly in this modern world to-morrow, the first thing He would see and would go toward, would be the halo over the scientist's head.

There is nothing especially picturesque or religious looking, nothing, at least, that could be put in a stained-glass window in Frederick Taylor's tables and charts and diagrams of the number of foot-tons a pig-iron handler can lift with his arms in a day.

He would find a practical way for instance for the employers and pig-iron handlers in the Midvale Steel Works to come to some sort of common understanding and to work cheerfully and with a free spirit together. I think he would proceed very much in the way that Frederick Taylor did.

He would not say much about the Golden Rule. He would give each man a vision for his work, and of the way it lapped over into other men's work and leave the Golden Rule a chance to take care of itself. This is all the Golden Rule, as a truth or as a remark needs just now.

For two thousand years men have devoted themselves Sunday day after Sunday to saying over and over again that men should love one another. The idea is a perfectly familiar one. When Christ said it two thousand years ago, it was so original and so sensational that just of itself and as a mere remark it had a carrying power over the whole earth.

Everybody believes it now—that it is a true remark—but like a score of other remarks that have been made and some of the noblest Christ made, is it not possible that it has long since in its mere capacity of being a remark, gone by? There is no one who has not heard about our loving one another. The remark we want now is how we can do it. This is the remark that Mr. Frederick Taylor has made. It is not very eloquent. It is a mere statement of fact. It has taken him nearly thirty-three years to make it.

Everybody listens. Everybody sees at a glance that when it comes to making remarks about doing as one would be done by, this is the one remark that we have all been waiting to hear some one make for two thousand years.

The Cross or the last-resort type of religion was as far as St. Augustine or St. Francis in their world could get. It was all that the Middle Ages were ready for or that could be claimed for people who had to live in ages without a printing press, in which no one in the crowd could expect to know anything and in which there were no ways of letting crowds know things.

To-day there is no reason why the Cross as a contrivance for attracting the attention of all people to goodness should be exclusively relied upon.

Possibly the Cross was intended, at the time, as the best possible way of starting a religion, when there was none, or possibly for keeping it up when there was very little of it.

But now that Christianity has been occupied two thousand years in putting in the groundwork, in laying down the principles of success, and in organizing them into the world, has been slowly making it possible with crowds that could not be long deceived for success to be decent. The leaven has worked into human nature and Christianity has produced The Successful Temperament.

Everything we plan for the world, including goodness, from this day—must reckon with him—with the Man Who Sees How.

THE SUCCESSFUL TEMPERAMENT

I also, Gentle Reader, have despised and do despise "success."

I also have stood, like you, perhaps, and I am standing now in that ancient, outer court, where I can keep seeing every day The Little Great Men with all their funny trappings on,—their hoods, and their ribbons, and their train-bearers, drive up before us all and go in to The Great Door. I have gone by in the night and have heard the buzz of their voices there. I have looked, like you, up at the great lighted windows of Prosperity from the street.

And in the broad daylight I have seen them too. I have stood on the curb in the public way with all the others and watched silently the parade of The Little Great go by.

I have waited like you, Gentle Reader, and smiled or I have turned on my heel sadly, or wearily or bitterly or gayly and walked away down my own side street of the world and with the huzzahs of the crowd echoing faintly in my ears have gone my way.

But I keep coming back to the curb again.

They are the men who have defied success to succeed and who will defy it again and again.

They are the great men.

The great man is the man who can get himself made and who will get himself made out of anything he finds at hand.

If success cannot do it, he makes failure do it. If he cannot make success express the greatness or the vision that is in him, he makes failure express it.

But this book is not about great men and goodness. It is about touching the imagination of crowds with goodness, about making goodness democratic and making goodness available for common people.

A stupendous success in goodness will advertise it as well as a stupendous failure.

Goodness has had its cross-redeemers to attract the attention of half a world.

Possibly it is having now its success-redeemers to attract the attention of the other half.

The people the success-redeemers reach would turn out to be, possibly, very much more than half.

The Cross, as a means of getting the attention of crowds, or of the more common people in our modern, practical-minded Western world, was apparently adapted to its purpose as long as it was used for church purposes or as long as it was kept dramatic or sensational or remote, or as long as it was a cross for some one else, but as a means of attracting the attention of crowds of ordinary men and women to goodness in common everyday things, it is very doubtful if failure—in the power of steady daily pulling on men's minds, has done as much for goodness as success.

But the more common and numerous types of men, the men who do not design worlds, but who execute them, build them, who carry the new designs of goodness out, who work through the details and conceive the technique of goodness are men in whom the spiritual and religious power takes the natural form of success.

It seems to be the nature of the modern and the western type of man to challenge fatalism, to defy a cross. He would almost boast that nobody could make him die on it. This spirit in men too is a religious spirit. It is the next hail of goodness. Goodness posts up its next huge notice on the world:

It is going to make the more rudimentary everyday people notice it, and it is going to make them notice it in everyday things. It does not admit that goodness is merely for the spiritual aristocrats for those greater souls that can search out and appreciate the spiritual values in failure.

We can die on crosses in our Western world as well as any one and we can do it in crowds too as they do in India, but we propose if crosses are expected of us to know why in crowds. Knowing why makes us think of things and makes us do things. It is the keynote of our temperament.

And it is not fair to say of us when we make this distinction that we do not believe in the cross. But there are times when some of us wish that we could get other people to stop believing in it. We would all but die on the cross to get other people to stop dying on one for platitudes, to get them to work their way down to the facts and focus their minds on the practical details of not dying on a cross, of forming a vision of action which will work. It goes without saying that as long as crowds are in the world crosses will not go by, but it is wicked not to make them go by as fast as possible, one by one. They were meant to be moved up higher. We are eager not to die on the same cross for the same thing year after year and century after century. It seems to us that the eagerness that always goes with the cross always was and always will be the essential, powerful and beautiful thing in it.

It is going to be the same with crosses. It is a sin and a slander and affront to human nature and to God to die on a cross if it can be helped by hard work and close thinking, or by touching the imaginations of others.

Most of us acting in most things are not good enough to die on crosses. We are not worthy, it would not be humble in us to. Crosses are only reserved for the newest and most rare truths, and for the newest and most rare men. They are still, and they still can be made to be, a means of grace and of perfection to people who have gifts of learning things by suffering, but as a means of making other people and people in crowds see things, the right to use a cross is not for those of us who are merely lumbering spiritually along, trying to catch up to a plain, simple-hearted old platitude, eighteen hundred years late like the Golden Rule. The right to a cross is reserved for those who are up on the higher reaches, those great bleak stretches or moors of truth where men go forth and walk alone with God hundreds of years ahead.

THE MEN AHEAD PULL

Writing a hopeful book about the human race with the New York Sun, Wall Street, Downing Street and Bernard Shaw looking on is uphill work.

Sometimes I wish there were another human race I could refer to when I am writing about this one, one every one knows. The one on Mars, for instance, if one could calmly point to it in the middle of an argument, shut people off with a wave of one's hand and say, "Mars this" and "Mars that" would be convenient.

The trouble with the human race is that when one is talking to it about itself, it thinks it is It.

It is not It yet.

The earth and everything on it is a huge Acorn, tumbling softly through the sky.

Our boasted Christianity (crosses, and resurrections and cathedrals and all) is a Child crying in the night.

Everything is following the fact-spirit. The modern world and everything in it, is falling into the hands of the men who cannot be cheated about facts, who get the facts first and who get them right.

The world cannot help falling, from now on, slowly—a little ponderously perhaps at first—into the hands of good men. To say that the world is falling into the hands of men who cannot be cheated and to say that it is falling into the hands of good men is to say the same thing.

The men who get the things that they want, get them by seeing the things as they are. Goodness and efficiency both boil down to the same quality in the modern man, his faculty for not being a romantic person and for not being cheated.

It is true that for the moment, it still seems—now that science has only just come to the rescue of religion, that evil men in a large degree are the men who still are standing in the gate and determining opportunities and letting in and letting out Civilization as they please. But their time is limited.

The fact-spirit is in the people. We enjoy facts. Facts are the modern man's hunting, his adventure and sport. The men who are ahead are getting into a kind of two-and-two-are-four habit that is like music, like rhythm. It becomes almost a passion, almost a self-indulgence in their lives. Being honest with things, having a distaste for being cheated by things, having a distaste for being cheated by one's self and for cheating other people, runs in the blood in modern men. The nations can be seen going round and round the earth and looking one another long and earnestly in the eyes. The poet is turning his imagination upon the world about him and upon the fact that really works in it. The scientific man has taken hold of religion and righteousness is being proved, melted down in the laboratory, welded together before us all and riveted on to the every day, on to what really happens, and on to what really works. Goodness in its baser form already pays. Only the biggest men may have found it out, but everybody is watching them. The most important spiritual service that any man can render the present age is to make goodness pay at the top (in the most noticeable place) in some business where nobody has made it pay before. Anybody can see that it almost pays already, that it pays now here, now there. At all events, anybody can see that it is very noticeable that the part of the world that is most spiritual is not merely the part that is whining or hanging on crosses. It is also the part that is successful. One knows scores of saints with ruddy cheeks. It is getting to be a matter of principle almost in a modern saint—to have ruddy cheeks.

I submit that this saint with ruddy cheeks is here, that he is lovable, imperturbable, imperious, irrepressible, as interesting as sin, as catching as the Devil and that he has come to stay.

He stays because he is successful and can afford to stay.

He is successful because he is good.

Only religion works.

I am aware that the New York Sun might quarrel with just exactly this way of putting it.

I might put it another way or possibly try to say it again after saying something else first. Viz.: The man who is successful in business is the man who can get people to do as much as they can do and a great deal more than they think they can do.

Only a very lively goodness, almost a religion in a man, can do this. He has to have something in him very like the power of inventing people or of making people over.

To be specific: In some big department stores, as one goes down the aisle, one will see over and over again the clerks making fun of customers.

One by one the customers find it out and the more permanent ones, those who would keep coming and who have the best trade, go to other stores.

How could such a thing be stopped in a department store by a practical employer? Can he stop it successfully by turning on his politeness?

A machine like a department store, made up of twenty-five hundred human beings, which is carving out its will, its nature, stamping its pattern on a city, on a million men, or on a nation, cannot be made to work without religion. If the clerks are making fun of people, only religion can stop it.

Perhaps you have been made fun of yourself, Gentle Reader? You have observed, perhaps, that in making fun of people (making fun of you, for instance), the assumption almost always is, that you are trying to be like the Standard Person, and that this (they look at you pleasantly as you go by) is as near as you can get to it! If an employer wishes to make his clerk an especially valuable clerk, if he wishes to make his clerk an expert in human nature or a good salesman, one who sees a customer when he comes along as he really is, and as he is trying to be, he will only be able to do it by touching something deep down in the clerk's nature, something very like his religion—his power of putting himself in the place of others. He can only do it by making a clerk feel that this power in him of doing as he would be done by, and seeing how to do it, i.e., the religion in him, is what he is hired for.

It is visionary to try to run a great department store, a great machine of twenty-five hundred souls, a machine of human emotions, of five thousand eyes and ears, a huge loom of enthusiasm, of love, hate, covetousness, sorrow, disappointment, and joy without having it full of clerks who are experts in human nature, putting themselves in the place of crowds of other people, clerks who are essentially religious.

So we watch the men who are ahead driving one another into goodness. The man who is not able to create, distribute or turn on, in his business establishment, goodness, social insight, and customer-insight in it, can only hope to-day to keep ahead in business by having competitors as inefficient as he is.

Of course as long as people looked upon goodness as a Sunday affair, a few hours a week put in on it, we were naturally discouraged about it.

It is still a little too fresh looking and it may be still a little too clever for everybody, but slowly, irrevocably, we see it coming. We can look up almost any day and watch some goodness—now—at least one specimen or so, in every branch of business.

We watch daily the men who are ahead, pulling on the goodness of the world and the Crowds pushing on it.

THE CROWDS PUSH

The men who are ahead make goodness start, but it is the crowds that make it irresistible.

The final, slow, long, imperious lift on goodness is the one the crowd gives. Of course, for the most part, modern business is largely done with crowds. Crowds are doing it and crowds are nearly always watching it.

The factory is slower than the department store in being good because the men in it deal with crowds of things and crowds of wheels and not with crowds of people.

All responsible people are forced to be good, with crowds around them, expecting it of them.

Crowds at the very least are a kind of vast, insinuating, penetrating, omnipresent, permeating police force of righteousness.

In a department store, the crowds, twelve thousand a day, are like some huge coil of hose or vacuum cleaner, lying about the place, sucking up, drawing out, and demanding goodness from the clerks. Clerks develop human insight and powers faster in department stores than machinists do in factories because they are exposed to more people and to larger crowds. The stream clears itself.

The last forms of business to yield to the new spirit are to be the lonely ones, the ones where light, air, human emotions, and crowds are shut out.

Crowds in the end will not accept less than the best. With crowds of people and crowds of places and crowds of times we are good. In all things crowds can see or be made to see we are safe. Progress lies in making crowds see through people, making crowds go past them. While they are going past them, they lure their goodness on.

THE MAN WHO SAYS HOW, SAYS HOW

The people who are worried and discouraged about goodness in this world, one finds when one studies them a little, are almost always worried in a kind of general way. They do not worry about anything in particular. Their religion seems to be a kind of good-hearted, pained vagueness.

The religion of the people who never worry at all, the thoughtless optimists, is quite the same too, except that they have a kind of happy, rosy-lighted vagueness instead.

For about two thousand years now, goodness has been in the hands of vague people. Some of them have used their vagueness to cry with softly, and some of them have used it to praise God with and to have many fine, brave, general feelings about God.

I have tried faithfully, speaking for one, to be religious with both of these sets of people.

They make one feel rather lonesome.

If one goes about and takes a grim happiness, a kind of iron joy in seeing how successful a locomotive is, or if one watches a great, worshipful ocean liner with delight, or if, down in New York, one looks up and sees a new skyscraper going slowly up, unfolding into the sky before one, lifting up its gigantic, restless, resistless face to God; there comes to seem to be something about churches and about good people and about the way they have of acting and thinking about goodness and doing things with goodness, that makes one unhappy.

I wonder in the presence of a Christianity like this whether I am a Christian or not—the quartet choirs, confections, the little, dainty, faintly sweet sermons—it is as if—no I will not say it....

I have this moment crossed the words out before my eyes. It is as if, after all, religion, instead of being as I supposed down at the foundry, the stern and splendid music of man conquering all things for God, were, after all, some huge, sublime and holy vagueness, as if the service and the things I saw about me were not hard true realities—as if going to Church were like sitting in a cloud—some soft musical cloud or floating island of goodness and drifting and drifting....

Not all churches are alike, but I am speaking of something that must have happened to many men. I but record this blank space on this page, as a spiritual fact, as a part of the religious experience of a man trying to be good.

The vagueness of the man who is good, who locks himself up in a Church and says, "Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!" and the vigour and incisiveness of the man who says nothing about it and who goes out of doors and acts like a god all the week—these remain with me as a daily and abiding sense.

And when I find myself myself, I, who have gloried in cathedrals since I was a little child, looking ahead for a God upon the earth, and when I see the foundries, the airships, the ocean liners beckoning the soul of man upon the skies, and the victory of the soul over the dust and over the water and over the air and when I see the Cathedrals beside them, those vast, faint, grave, happy, floating islands of the Saved, drifting backward down the years, it does not seem as if I could bear the foundries saying one thing about my God and the cathedrals saying another.

I have tried to see a way out. Why should it be so?

I have seen that the foundries, the ocean liners, and the airships are in the hands of men who say How.

Perhaps we will take goodness and cathedrals, very soon now, and put them for a while in the hands of the men who say how. If St. Francis, for instance, to-day, were to be suddenly more like Bessemer, or if Dr. Henry Van Dyke were more like Edison or if the Reverend R.J. Campbell were more like Sir Joseph Lister or if the Bishop of London were to go at London the way Marconi goes at the sky, what would begin to happen to goodness? One likes to imagine what would happen if that same spirit, the spirit of "how" were brought to bear upon a great engineering enterprise like goodness in this world.

Perhaps the spirit of "how" is the spirit of God.

Perhaps religion in the twentieth century is Technique.

Technique in the twentieth century is the Holy Ghost.

When the inventors, in our machine age, get to work on goodness in the way that they are getting to work on other things, things will begin to happen to goodness that the vague, sweet saints of two thousand years have never dreamed of yet.

In London and New York, in this first quarter of the twentieth century Christianity will not be put off as a spirit. The right of Christianity to be a spirit has lapsed.

Christianity is a Method.

What Christ meant when He said He was the Truth and the Life, has been understood, on the whole, very well. What He meant by saying He was the Way, we are now beginning, to work out.

A thousand or two years ago, when two men stood by the roadside and made a bargain, it was their affair.

When two men stand on the sidewalk now and make a bargain, say in New York, they have to deal and to deal very thoughtfully and accurately with ninety million people who are not there. They do this as well as they can by imagining what the ninety million people would do and say, and how they would like to be done by, if they were there.

The facilities for finding out what the ninety million people would do and say, and what they would want, the general conveniences for assuring the two men on the sidewalk that they will be able to conduct their bargain, and to get the other ninety million in, accurately, that they will be able to do by them as they would be done by—these have scarcely been arranged for yet.

Religion two-men size, or man and woman size, or one family or two family size or village size has been worked out. Religion as long as it has been concerned with a few people and was a matter of love between neighbours, or of skill in being neighbourly, has had no special or imperative need for science or the scientific man.

Now that religion is obliged to be an intimate, a confiding relation between ninety million people, the spiritual genius, devotion, and holiness of the scientific man, of the man who says "how" has come to be the modern man's almost only access to his God.

A ninety million man-power religion is an enterprise of spiritual engineering, a feat in national and international statesmanship, a gigantic structural constructive achievement in human nature. Doing as one would be done by, with a few people, is a thing that any man can sit down and read his Bible a few minutes and arrange for himself. He can manage to do as he would be done by, fairly well in the next yard. But how about doing as one would be done by with ninety million people—all sizes, all climates, all religions, Buffalo, New Orleans, Seattle? How about doing as one would be done by three thousand miles?

It is an understatement to say, as we look about our modern world, that Christianity has not been tried yet.

Christianity has not been invented yet.

What was invented two thousand years ago was the spirit of Christianity.

Christianity has been for two thousand years a spirit.

It is almost like a new religion to me just of itself to think of it. It is like being presented suddenly with a new world to think of it, to think that all we have really done with Christianity as yet is to use it as a breath or spirit.

All the Christianity we can bring to bear or that we can use to run this crash of intimacy with is a spirit, a breath.

We do not well to berate one another or to berate one another's motives or to assail human nature or to grow satirical about God with all our little battered helpless Christians about us and our unadjusted religions.

We are a new human race grappling with a new world. Our Christianity has not been invented yet and if we want a God, we will work like chemists, like airmen, turn the inside of the earth out, dump the sky, move mountains, face cities, love one another, and find Him!

In the meantime until we have done this, until we have worked as chemists and airmen work, Christianity is a spirit.

It explains all this eager jumble of the world, brushes away our objections, frees our hearts, gives us our program, makes us know what we are for, to stop and think a moment of this—that Christianity is a spirit.

Everything that is passing wonderful is a spirit at first. God begins building a world as a world-spirit, out of a spirit brooding upon the waters. Then for a long while the vague waters, then for a long while a little vague land or spirit-of-planet before a real world.

And every real belief that man has had, has begun as a spirit.

As he groped his way up in his singing, he felt them in spirit, perhaps, the lonely wandering minstrels in little closed-in valleys, or on the vast quiet hills, filling the world with his voice when he was dead, going about with his singing, breaking it in upon the souls of children, of the new boys and girls, and building new worlds and rebuilding old worlds in the hearts of men. Homer had the spirit of hearing his own voice forever, but the technique of it, the important point of seeing how the thing could really be done, of seeing how people, instead of listening to imitations or copies or awkward echoes of Homer, should listen to Homer's voice itself—the timbre, the intimacy, the subtlety, the strength of it—the depth of his heart singing out of it. All this has had to wait to be thought out by Thomas A. Edison.

Man has not only for thousands of years had the spirit of immortality, of keeping his voice filed away if any one wanted it on the earth, forever, but he has had all the other spirits or ghosts of his mightier self. He has had the spirit of being imperious and wilful with the sea, of faring forth on a planet and playing with oceans, and now he has worked out the details in ocean liners, in boats that fly up from the water, and in boats which dive and swim beneath the sea. For thousands of years he has had the spirit of the locomotive working through, troops of runners or of dim men groping defiantly with camels through deserts, or sweeping on on horses through the plains, and now with his banners of steam at last he has great public trains of cars carrying cities.