THE MAN WHO STANDS BY
I have been trying to say in this book that goodness in daily life, or in business, in common world-running or world housekeeping, is by an implacable crowd-process working slowly out of the hands of the wrong men into the hands of the right ones.
If this is not true, I am ready to declare myself as a last resort, in favour of a strike.
There is only one strike that would be practical.
I would declare for a strike of the saviours.
By a saviour I do not mean a man who stoops down to me and saves me. A saviour to me is a man who stands by and lets me save myself.
I am afraid we cannot expect much of men who can bear the idea of being saved by other people, or by saviours who have a stooping feeling.
I rejoice daily in the spirit of our modern laboring men, in that holy defiance in their eyes, in the way they will not say "please" to their employers and announce that they will save themselves.
The only saviour who can do things for labouring men is the saviour who proposes to do things with them, who stands by, who helps to keep oppressors and stooping saviours off—who sees that they have a fair chance and room to save themselves.
I define a true saviour as a man who is trying to save himself.
It was because Christ, Savonarola, and John Bunyan were all trying to save themselves that it ever so much as occurred to them to save worlds. Saving a world was the only way to do it.
The Cross was Christ's final stand for his own companionableness, his stand for being like other people, for having other people to share his life with, his faith in others and his joy in the world.
The world was saved incidentally when Christ died on the Cross. He wanted to live more abundantly—and he had to have certain sorts of people to live more abundantly with. He did not want to live unless he could live more abundantly.
We live in a world in which inventors want to die if they cannot invent and in which Hewers want to die if they cannot hew.
I am not proud. I am willing to be saved. Any saviour may save me if he wants to, if his saving me is a part of his saving himself.
If the inventor saves me and saves us all because he wants to be in a world where an inventor can invent, wants some one to invent to; if the artist saves me because it is part of his worship of God to have me saved and wants to use me every day to rejoice about the world with—if the Hewer comes over and hews out a place in the world for me because he wants to hew, I am willing.
All that I demand is, that if a man take the liberty of being a saviour to me that he refrain from stooping, that he come up to me and save me like a man, that he stand before me and tell me that here is something that we, he and I, shoulder to shoulder, can do, something that neither of us could do alone. Then he will fall to with me and I will fall to with him, and we will do it.
This is what I mean by a saviour.