BOOK TWO

      LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD


      CHAPTER XII

      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.

      Possibly it is because many other people beside myself
      have been slow in clearly making this distinction between
      "Honesty is the best policy" as a motive or a Te Deum, that
      I have come upon so many religious men and women in the [155]
      last two or three years, who, in the finest spirit, have seemed
      to me to be doing all that they could to discourage every-
      body especially to discourage me, about the Golden Rule.

      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.

      I only know that the moment I see evil triumphing in this [156]
      world, there is one thing that that evil comes up against.

      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 en-
      countered.

      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, craftsmanship, 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.

      But why is it that when the world makes a man suffer,
      everybody should seem always to be thinking of the man? [157]
      Why does not anybody think of the world?

      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 tak-
      ing 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, anaemic 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.

      For hundreds of years we have religiously run after martyrs
      and we have learned in a way, most of us, to have a kind of
      cooped-up patriotism for our own nation, but why are there not
      more people who are patriotic toward the whole human race?

      One has been used to seeing it now for centuries, good people
      allover the world hanging their harps on willow trees, or snug-
      gling down together by the cold sluggish stream of their lives,
      and gossiping about how the world has abused them, when
      they would be far better occupied, nine out of ten of them—
      in doing something that would make it stop. There was a poet
      and soldier some thousands of years ago who put more real
      religion (and put it too, into his imprecatory psalms), than has
      been put, I believe, into all the sweet whinings and the spiritual
      droopings of the world in three thousand years. I do not deny
      that I would quarrel, as a matter of form, with the lack of
      urbanity, with a certain ill-nature in the imprecatory Psalms,
      but with the spirit in them, with the motive and mighty desire, [158]
      with the necessity in the man's heart that was poured into them,
      I have the profoundest sympathy.

      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 naive 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 move-
      ment 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.

      As we look at it, it ought not to be necessary to jump on
      the necks of the wicked to make them good, that is, to make [159]
      them understand what they would wish they had done in
      twenty years. We live in a more reasoning and precise age
      and what more particularly concerns us in the wicked is not
      their necks, but their heads and their hearts. It seems to
      us that they are not using them very much and that the mo-
      ment they do and we can get them to, they will be good.

      Possibly it was a mere matter of language, a concession to
      the then state of the language—David's wanting their necks
      to be jumped on so that he could get their attention at first
      and make them stop and think and understand. More subtle
      ways of expressing things to the wicked have been thought
      of to-day than of jumping on their necks, but the principle
      David had in mind has not changed, the principle of being
      loyal to the human race, the principle of standing up for
      people and insisting that they were really meant to be better
      than they were or than they thought they could be—a kind
      of holy patriotism David had for this world. The main
      fact about David seems to be that he believed he belonged
      to a great human race. Incidentally he believed he belonged
      to a human race that was really quite bright, bright enough
      at least to make people sorry for doing wrong in it—a human
      race that was getting so shrewd and so just and so honest
      that it took stupider and stupider people every year to be
      wicked, and when he found, judging from recent events in
      Judea, that this for the time being was not so, he had a hate-
      ful feeling about it, which it seems to some of us, vastly im-
      proved him and would improve many of us. We do not
      claim that the imprecatory Psalms were David's best, but
      they must have helped him immensely in writing the other ones.

      . . . . . . .

      We may be wrong. But it has come to be an important
      religious duty to some of us, or rather religious joy, to hate
      the prosperity of the wicked. We hate the prosperity of
      the wicked, not because it is their prosperity and not ours, [160]
      but because their prosperity constitutes a sneer or slander
      on the world. We have no idea of wanting to go about faith-
      fully jumping upon the necks of the wicked. What we want
      is to feel that we are in a world where the good people are
      happy and are making goodness reasonable, successful, profit-
      able and practical in it. We want an earth with crowds on it
      who see things as they are, and who guess so well on what
      they want (i.e., who are good) that other people who do not
      know what they want and are not good, will be lonesome.

      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 feel-
      ing 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 arrange-
      ments for a world in which after this, very soon now, righteous-
      ness is going to attend strictly to its own business and unright-
      eousness 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.

      But this is a matter of form. The main fundamental [161]
      manful instinct David had—the idea that there should not
      be any more people dying on crosses than could be helped—
      that collective society should take hold of Evil and set it
      down hard in its chair and make it cry seems to many of us
      absolutely sound. Of course, we feel that it is not for us, those
      who love righteousness, to jump on the necks of the wicked.

      We prefer to have it attended to in a more dignified, imper-
      sonal way by Society as a whole. So we believe that society
      should proceed to making goodness and honesty pay. If
      Society will not do it we will do it. The world may be against
      us at first but we will at least clear off a small place on it—
      in our own business for instance—where our goodness can
      command the most shrewdness and the most technique—
      and we will do what we can slowly—one industry at a time,
      to remove the slander on goodness that goodness is not ef-
      ficient, and the slander on the world that goodness cannot
      be self-supporting self-respecting (and without disgrace), even
      comfortable in it.

      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."

      Standing up for the world means standing by men who [162]
      believe in it, standing by men who make everything they
      do in business a declaration of their faith in God and their
      faith in the credit of human nature, men who put up money
      daily in their advertising, their buying and selling, on the
      loyalty, common sense, brains, courage, goodness, and right-
      eous indignation of the people.

      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 inter-
      pretation 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 anyone 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."