1. We want to be good.
2. We want other people to be good, partly as a matter of convenience for us, partly for morally aesthetic reasons, and partly because we want to be in a kind of world where what is good in us works.
The next point in our confession follows from this. It is an awkward and exposed thing to say out loud to people in general, but
3. Lim and I want to make over the earth.
4. Sitting down grimly by ourselves, all alone, and believing in a world hard, with our eyes shut, does not interest us. It is this particular planet just as it is that interests us, in its present hopeful, squirming state.
It does not seem to us to the point just now to conceive some brand new, clean, slick planet up in space, with crowds of perfect and convenient people on it, and then expect to lay it down in the night like a great, soft, beautiful dew or ideal on this one. We want to take this heavy, inconvenient, cumbersome, real planet that we have, and see what can be done with it, and by the people on it, what can be done by these same people, whose signs one goes by down the street, with Smith & Smith, Gowns, with Clapp & Clapp, Butchers, with W.H. Riley & Co., Plumbers and Gas Fitters, and with things that real people are really doing.
The things that real people are really doing, when one thinks of it, are Soap, Tooth-brushes, Subsoil Pipes, Wall Papers, Razors, Mattresses, Suspenders, Tiles, Shoes, Pots, and Kettles. Of course the first thing that happened to us, to Lim and to me (as any one might guess, in a little quiet job like making over the earth), was that we found we had to begin with ourselves.
We did.
We are obliged to admit that, as a matter of fact, we began, owing to circumstances, in a kind of rudimentary way with the idea of getting people to take up goodness by talking about it.
But we are reformed preachers now. We seldom backslide into talking to people about goodness.