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.