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 whatever 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 a 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 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 att.i.tude 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 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 n.o.ble, happy enterprise of standing up for this world and of a.s.serting that these men who were in it are good enough to be religious here and to be the sons of G.o.d now--that Christianity began to function.

Religion has been making apparently a side trip for nearly twelve hundred years, a side trip into s.p.a.ce 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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!

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 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.

People thought of His successes when they thought of Him on the Cross, and they have kept thinking of them for thousands 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 a.n.a.lysis it was not His ideas or His character merely, but it was His technique that made Christ the Son of G.o.d 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 n.o.bler 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."

And He then went on to tell them how much finer, and n.o.bler 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 any one 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 G.o.d.

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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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.