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 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 moment 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 hateful feeling about it, which it seems to some of us, vastly improved 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, but because their prosperity constitutes a sneer or slander on the world. We have no idea of wanting to go about faithfully 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, profitable 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 feeling 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 arrangements for a world in which after this, very soon now, righteousness is going to attend strictly to its own business and unrighteousness 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 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, impersonal 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 it 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 inefficient, 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 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 righteous indignation of the people.