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Contents |
BOOK TWO
LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD
CHAPTER XIII
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.
They are wont to tell me when we argue about it that what-
ever I may be able to say for success as a means of touching
the imaginations of crowds with goodness, great or attractive
or enthralling characters are not produced by success. Success
does not produce great characters. It is now and always has
been failure that develops the characters of the men who are [164]
truly great.
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.
If Non were trying to express his idea of the suffering of [165]
Christ, I imagine he would say that in the hardest time of all
when his body was hanging on the Cross, the thing that was
really troubling Christ was not that he was being killed. The
thing that was troubling him was that the world really seemed,
at least for the time being, the sort of world that could do such
things. He did not take his own cross too personally or too
literally as the world's permanent or fixed attitude toward
goodness or every degree of goodness. There was a sense in
which he did not believe except temporarily in his own cross.
He did not think that the world meant it or that it would ever
own up that it meant it.
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.
Among those who have tried the martyr way of doing things
Jesus is almost the only one who has not in his heart abused
the world. Most martyrs have made a kind of religion out of
not expecting anything of it and of trying to get out of it.
"And ye, all ye people, are ye suitable or possible people for me
to be religious with?" the typical martyr exclaims to all the
cities, to all the inventors, to the scientists and to the earth-
redeemers, to his neighbours and his fellow men. It was not [166]
until science in the person of Galileo came to the rescue of
Christianity and began slowly to bring it back to where Christ
started it—as a noble, happy enterprise of standing up for
this world and of asserting that these men who were in it are
good enough to be religious here and to be the sons of God now
—that Christianity began to function. Religion has been
making apparently a side trip for nearly twelve hundred years,
a side trip into space or into the air or into the grave for holiness
for the eternal, and for the infinite.
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 across 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!
CHAPTER XIV
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 techni-
cal 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.
People thought of His successes when they thought of Him [168]
on the Cross, and they have kept thinking of them for thou-
sands of years.
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 Fred-
erick 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 anyone 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."
And He then went on to tell them how much finer, and nobler [169]
and more free from the cares and weights of this earth
they could be if they wanted to be, than they had
dared to believe. He told the people who were around
Him bigger things about human nature, how successful it was
or could be than anyone had ever claimed for people in this
world before. They put Him up on a Cross at last and crucified
Him because they thought He was too hopeful about them,
and about human nature or because, as they would have put it,
He was blasphemous and said every man was a Son of God.
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 advertise-
ment 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.
But if Christ returned to the world to-morrow and if what [170]
He wanted to do to-morrow was to get the universal, profound,
convinced attention of all men to the Golden Rule, I believe
He would begin the way Frederick Taylor did, by—being
concrete. If He wanted to get men in general, men in busi-
ness, to love one another He would begin by trying to work
out some technical, practical way in which certain particular
men in a certain particular place could afford to love one
another.
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 Sun-
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.
The gist of it is that for thirty-three years, the employers and
the pig-iron handlers in the Midvale Steel Works, Pennsylvania, [171]
have been devoted to one another and to one another's interests
and acting all day every day as if of course their interests
were the same, and it has been found that employees when their
employers cooperated with them could lift forty-seven tons
instead of twelve and a half a day, and were getting 60 per
cent more wages.
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 any-
thing 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 princi-
ples 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.
Success has become a spiritual institution. In other words,
the hour of the Scientist, of the man with a technique, of the
man who sees how, the man of The Successful Temperament is
at hand.
Everything we plan for the world, including goodness, from
this day—must reckon with him—with the Man Who
Sees How.
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