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Contents |
BOOK TWO
LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD
CHAPTER VI
GOODNESS AS A CROWD-PROCESS
THE basis of successful business is imagination about other
people. The best way to train one's imagination about other
people is to try different ways of being of service to them.
Trying different ways of merely getting money out of them
does not train the imagination. It is too easy.
Business is going to be before long among the noblest of the
professions, because it takes the highest order of imagination to
succeed in it. Goodness is no longer a Sunday school. The
whole world, in a rough way, is its own Sunday school.
To have the most brains render the most service—render
services people had never dreamed of before.
Why bother to tell people to be good? It bores us. It bores
them. Presently we will tell them over our shoulders, as
we go by, to use their brains. Goodness is a by-product of
efficiency.
Being good every day in business stands in no need of being
stood up for, or apologized for, or even helped. All of these
things may be expedient and human and natural, because one
cannot help being interested in particular people and in a
particular generation; but they are not really necessary to
goodness. It is only when we are tired, or when we only half
believe in it, that we feel to-day that goodness needs to be
stood up for. In a day when men make vast crowds of things,
so that the things are seen everywhere, and when the things are
made to stand the test of crowds—crowds of days, or crowds
of years—and when they make them for crowds of people,
goodness does not need scared and helpful people defending it.
I have seen that goodness is a thing to be sung about like a [115]
sunset. I have seen that goodness is organic, and grounded
in the nature of things and in the nature of man. I have seen
that being good is the one great adventure of the world, the
huge daily passionate moral experiment of the human heart—
that all men are at work on it, that goodness is an implacable
crowd process, and that no"thing can stop it.
CHAPTER VII
THOUGHTS ON BEING IMPROVED BY
OTHER PEOPLE
BUT Fate has so arranged our lives that we all have to live
cooped up in one particular generation. Living in all of them,
especially the ages just ahead, and seeing as one looks out upon
them how goodness wins, may be well enough when one is tired
or discouraged and is driven to it, but in the meantime all the
while we are living in this one. The faces of the people we know
flit past us; the gaunt, grim face of the crowd haunts us—the
crowd that will slip softly off the earth very soon and drop into
the Darkness—a whole generation of it, without seeing how
things are coming out; and there is something about the streets,
about the look of women as they go by, something about the
faces of the little children, that makes one wish goodness would
hurry. One cannot think with any real pleasure of goodness as
a huge, slow, implacable moral glacier, a kind of human force
of gravity, grinding out truths and grinding under people,
generation after generation, down toward some vast, beautiful,
happy valley with flowers and children in it and majestic old
men thousands of years away. One wishes goodness would
hurry. We are not content, some of us, with having the good
people climb over the so-called evil ones and gain the supremacy
of the world, and all because the evil people do not see what
they really want to do or would have wished they had done
afterward. We want the evil ones, so called, to see what they
really want now. We cannot help believing that there is some
way of attracting their attention to what they really want now.
I have seen, or seemed to see, in my time that there is almost
no limit to what people can do if they can get their own atten- [117]
tion, or if some person or some event will happen by that can
get their attention for them.
Paralytics jumped from their beds at the time of the San
Francisco earthquake and ran for blocks. The whole earth
had to shake them in order to get their attention; but it did it,
and they saw what it was they wanted, and they ran for it at
once, whether they were paralytics or not. In the fire that
followed the earthquake, people that had been sick in bed for
weeks were seen, scores of them, dragging their trunks through
the streets.
I have seen, too, in my time scores of people doing great feats
of goodness in this way, things that they knew they could
not do, dragging huge moral trunks after them, or swinging
them up on their shoulders. I have seen men who thought
they were old in their hearts, and who thought they were wicked,
running like boys, with shouts and cheers, to do right. It was
all a matter of attention. The question with most of us would
seem to be: How can one get one's attention to what one would
wish one had done in twenty years, and how can one get other
people's—all the people with whom we are living and work-
ing—to do with us what they would wish they had done, in
twenty minutes, twenty days, or twenty years?
Letting the Crowd be Good, all turns in the long run upon
touching the imagination of Crowds.
In the last analysis, the coming of the kingdom of heaven,
as it has been called, is going to be the coming slowly, and from
unsuspected quarters, of a new piety and of new kinds of saints
into the forefront of modern life—saints who can attract
attention, saints who can make crowds think what they really
want.
Using the word in its more special sense, the time has come
when it is being keenly realized that if goodness is to be properly
appreciated by crowds, it must be properly advertised.
How can goodness be advertised to Crowds?
Who are the people that can touch the imagination of Crowds? [118]
The best and most suggestive truths that most of us could
come to with regard to doing right, would come from a study
of the people who have tried to make us do it. Most of us, if
we were asked to name the people most prominently connected
with the virtues that we have studied and wondered about most,
would mention, probably, either our parents or our preachers.
Many of us feel quite expert about parents. We have studied
vividly, and sometimes with almost a breathless interest, all
their little ways of getting us to be good, and there is hardly
anyone who has not come to quite definite conclusions of how
he should be preached to. I have thought it would be not
unfruitful to consider in this connection either our parents or
our preachers. I have decided to consider the preachers who
try to make me good, because they are a little less complicated
than parents.
Preachers can only be put into classes in a general way.
They often overlap, and many of them change over from one
class into another every now and then on some special subject,
or on some special line of experience which they have had.
But for the most part, at least as regards emphasis, preachers
may be said to divide off into three classes:
Those who tease us to do right.
Those who make us see that doing right, if anyone wants
to do it, is really an excellent thing.
Those who make us want to do it.
. . . . . . .
I never go to hear a second time, if I can help it, a preacher
who has teased me to do right. I used to hope at first that
perhaps a clergyman who was teasing people might incidentally
slip off the track a minute, and say something or see something
interesting and alive. But, apparently, preachers who do not
see that people should not be teased to do right, do not see other
things, and I have gradually given up having hopeful moments
about them. Why, in a world like this, with the right and the [119]
wrong in it all lying so eloquent and plain and beautiful in the
lives of the people about us, and just waiting to be uncovered
a little, waiting to be looked at hard a minute, should audiences
be gathered together and teased to do right?
If the right were merely to be had in sermons or on paper,
it might be different. My own experience with the right has
been, if I may speak for one, that when I get out of the way
of the people who are doing it, and let the right they are doing
be seen by people, everybody wants it. When people who are
doing right are quietly revealed, uncovered a little further by
a preacher, everybody envies them, and teasing becomes
superfluous. People sit in their seats and think of them, and
become covetous to be like them. If, this very day, all the
ministers of the world were to agree that, on next Sunday
morning at half-past ten o'clock, they all with one accord
would preach a sermon teasing people to be rich, it would not
be more absurd, or more pathetic, or more away from the point,
than it would be to preach a sermon teasing people to be good.
They want to be good now; they envy the people that they see
going about the world not leaning on others to be good—
self-poised, independent, free, rich, spiritually self-supporting
persons.
The men and women that we know may be more or less
muddled in their minds with philosophy or with theology, or
perhaps they are being deceived by expediency or being bullied
by their environment, but they are not wicked; they are out of
focus, and what they desire when they go to church on Sunday
morning is to get a good look at beautiful and refreshing things
that they want, and for an hour and a half, if possible, with slow
steadied thought see their own lives in perspective. It is a
criminal waste of time to get hundreds of people to come into
church on a Sunday morning and seat them all together in a
great room where they cannot get out, and then tease them
and tell them they ought to be good. They knew it before
they came. They are already agreed, all of them, that they [120]
want to be good. They even want to be good in business—
as good as they can afford to. The question is how to manage
to do it. The thing that is troubling them is the technique.
How can they be good in their business—more good than their
employers want them to be, for instance—and keep their
positions? Doing as one would wish one had done afterward,
or knowing what one is about, or "being good" as it is some-
times called, is a thing that all really clever people have agreed
upon. They simply cannot manage some of the details—details
like time and place, a detail like being good now, for instance,
or like being good here. It is the more practical things
like these that trouble people, or they grow mixed in their
thoughts about the big goods and the little ones—which
shall be first in order of importance or which in the order of
time. And when one sees that people are really like this in
their hearts, and when one sees them, all these poor, helpless
people, sitting cooped up in a church for an hour and a half
being teased to be good, it is small wonder that it seems, or is
coming to seem, to the clean-cut morally businesslike men and
women we have to-day, a pitiful waste of time.
. . . . . . .
I come to the second class of preachers I had in mind with
more diffidence. My feelings about them are not so simple
and rudimentary as my feelings about those who have teased
me to be good.
Any man who travels about, or who drops into churches
wherever he happens to be from Sunday to Sunday, is almost sure
to find in every city of considerable size at least one imperious
capable baffling clergyman. If one is strictly honest and fair
toward him, to say nothing of being a well-meant and hopeful
human being who is living in the same world with him and who
feels very imperfect too, finding any serious and honest fault with
the sermon.. or at least laying one's finger upon what the fault
is, seems to be almost impossible. One simply comes out of [121]
the church in a nice, neat little glow of good-will and admiration,
and with a strange, soothing, happy sense of new, fresh, con-
venient wisdom.
The only fair way to criticise the preacher who belongs in
this class seems to be to take ten years for it, go in regularly
and get a little practice every Sunday. There are preachers
who preach so well that the only way one can ever find what is
the matter with their sermons is to sit quietly while they are
preaching them, and look around at the people. One thinks
as one looks around, "These people are what this man has done."
They are the same people they were ten years ago.
I often hear other sermons that are far easier to criticise.
They are one-sided or narrow, but they make new people.
I might not always like to be in a congregation when a man
is preaching a sermon that makes new people, because he may
be making people or kinds of people that at the time at least
I do not need to be. But I naturally prefer, at least part of
the time, a preacher who puts in, before he is through, some
good work on me. There is a preacher in B ____ who always
arouses in me, whenever I am in the city, the same old, curious,
hopeful feeling about him that this next one more time he is
going to get to me, that I am going to be attended to. I cannot
say how many times I have dropped in upon him in his big
plain church, seen him with his hushed congregation all about
him, all listening to him up to the last minute, each of them
sitting all alone with his own soul, and with him, and with the
ticking of the clock. And the sermon is always about the same.
You see him narrowing the truth down wonderfully, ruthlessly,
to You. You begin to see everything—to see all the argu-
ments, all the circumstances, all the principles. You see them
narrowing you down grimly, closing in upon you, converging
you and all your little, mean life, driving you apparently at last
into one helpless beautiful corner of doing right. You feel while
you listen the old sermon-thrill you have felt before, a kind of
intellectual joy in God, in the very brains of God; you think [122]
of how He has arranged right and wrong so cunningly, laid them
all out so plain and so close beside each other for you to choose
to be good. Then the benediction is pronounced over you,
the sevenfold amen dies away over you, and you go home and
do as you like.
One sees the sermon for days afterward lying out there in
calm and orderly memory, all so complete and perfect by
itself. There does not really seem to be any need of doing
anything more to it. It is what people mean probably by
a "finished sermon." It is as if goodness had been put under
a glass globe in a parlour. You go home proud to think of it,
and proud of course to have such a sermon by you. But you
would never think of touching such a complete and perfect
thing during the week the way you would a poorer sermon,
disturbing it hopefully or mussing it over, trying to work some
of it into your own life.
. . . . . . .
So much for the first two types of preachers: the preachers
who stand before us Sunday morning with goodness placed be-
side them in a dense darkness while they talk, and who tease us
to look at it in the darkness and to take some; and those who
stand, a cold white light all about them, and use pointers and
blackboards and things—maps of goodness, great charts of what
people ought to be like—and who make one see each virtue
just where it belongs as a kind of dot, like cities in a geography,
and who leave us with the pleasant feeling of how sweet and
reasonable God is, or rather would be if anybody would pay
any attention to Him.
. . . . . . .
I have already hinted at the qualities of the third class of
preachers—those who make me want to be good. They seem to
throw goodness as upon a screen. some vast screen of the world,
of this real world about me. They turn their souls, like still [123]
stereopticons, upon the faces of men—men who are like the
men and women I know. I go about afterward all the week
seeing their sermons in the street. Everybody I see, every-
thing that comes up Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the very
patterns of the days and nights, of my duties and failures, keep
coming up, reminding me to be good. I may start in—I often
do—with such a preacher, criticising him, but he soon gets
me so occupied criticising myself and so lost in wondering how
this something that he has and sees just beyond us, just beyond
him, just beyond me, can be had for other people, and how I
can have some of it for myself, that I forget to criticise. He
searches my soul, makes me a new being in my presence before
my eyes—that is, a new being toward some one subject, or
some one possibility in the world. He helps me while in his
presence to accomplish the supreme thing that one man can
ever do for another. He helps me to get my own attention.
He makes me see a set of particular things that I immediately,
before his next sentence, am trying to find means to do. He
does not attract my attention toward what he wants, like a
preacher who teases; nor does he attract my attention to what
God wants, like the preacher with the charts of goodness. He
succeeds in attracting and holding down my attention to what
I really want for myself or others, and to what I propose to get.
The imagination of crowds is convinced only by men who
have real genius for expression, for making word-pictures of
real things, men who have what might be called moving-
picture minds, and who are so picturesque and vivid that
when they talk to people about goodness they have seen,
everybody feels as if they had been there. It has to be admitted
that this type of preacher, who has a kind of genius, and has
developed an art form for expressing goodness in words, is
necessarily an exceptional man. And it is unreasonable and
unfair in the public to expect a man to get up in the pulpit and,
with no costume and no accessories, merely with a kind of
shrewd holiness or divination into human nature, present good- [124]
ness so that we seem to be there. It is small wonder that a
man who finds he is expected to be a kind of combination of bio-
graph, brother, spiritual detective, and angel all in one, in order
to do his work successfully has days of feeling that he has
joined the ranks of The Impossible Profession.
CHAPTER VIII
MAKING GOODNESS HURRY
PERHAPS it has leaked out to those who have been following
these pages thus far, that I am merely at best, if the truth were
known, a kind of reformed preacher.
I admit it. Many other people are. We began, owing to
circumstances, with the idea of getting people to take up good-
ness by talking about it.
But we have grown discouraged in talking to people about
goodness. More and more, year by year, we have made up
our minds, as I have hinted, to lie low and to keep still and
show them some.
And I can only say it again, as I have said it before, if every-
body in the world could know my plumber or pay a bill to him,
the world would soon begin, slowly but surely, to be a very
different place.
The first time I saw B ____ I had asked him to come over
to arrange with regard to putting in new waterpipes from the
street to my house. The old ones had been put in no one could
remember how many years before, and the pressure of water
in the house, apparently from rust in the pipes, had become
very weak. After a minute's conversation I at once engaged
B ____ to put in the new and larger pipes, and he agreed to
dig open the trench (about two hundred feet long, and three
feet deep) and put the pipes in the next day for thirty-five
dollars. The next morning he appeared as promised, but,
instead of going to work, he came into my study, stood there a
moment before my eyes, and quietly but firmly threw himself
out of his job!
There was no use in spending thirty-five dollars, he said. [126]
He had gone to the City Water Works Office and told them to
look into the matter and see if the connection they had put
in at the junction of my pipe with the main in the street did not
need attention. They had found that a new connection was
necessary. They would see that a new one was put in at once.
They were obliged to do it for nothing, he said; and then,
slipping (figuratively speaking) thirty-five dollars into my
pocket, he bowed gravely and was gone.
B ____ knew absolutely and conclusively (as anyone would
with a look) that I was not the sort of person who would ever
have heard of that blessed little joint out in the street, or who
ever would hear of it—or who would know what to do with it
if he did.
. . . . . . .
Sometimes I sit and think of B ____ in church, or at least
I used to, especially when his bill had just come in. It was
always a pleasure to think of paying one of B ____ 's bills—
even if it was sometimes a postponed one. You always knew,
with B ____, that he had made that bill out to you as if he had
been making out a bill to himself.
Not such a bad thing to think about during a sermon.
I do not deny that I do lose a sentence now and then in ser-
mons; and while, as every one knows, the sermons I have been
provided with in the old stone church have been of a rare and
high order, there have, I do acknowledge, been bad moments—
little sudden bare spots or streaks of abstraction—and I do
not deny that there have been times when I could not help
feeling, as I sat listening, like sending around Monday morning
to the parsonage—my plumber. One could not help thinking
what Dr. ____ if he once got started on a plumber like B ____
(had had him around working all the week during a sermon)
could do with him.
I have a shoemaker, too, who would help most ministers.
I imagine he would point up their sermons a good deal—if [127]
they had his shoes on.
Perhaps shoes and pipes and things like these will be looked
upon soon to-day as constituting the great, slow, modest, im-
placable spiritual forces of our time.
At all events, this is the most economical, sensible, thorough
way (when one thinks of it) that goodness can be advertised.
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