It is not necessary for me to prove to the satisfaction of the New York Sun and Bernard Shaw that the Golden Rule has not reached the superior moral stage of being taken as a platitude by all of our people who are engaged in business. It is enough to submit that the most creative and forceful business men—the men who set the pace, the foremen of the world, are taking it so, and that others are trying to be as much like them as they can. Wickedness in this world is not going to stop with a jerk. It is merely being better distributed. Possibly this is all there is to the problem, getting sin better distributed. The Devil has never had a very great outfit or any great weight, but he has always known where to throw it, and he has always done an immense business on a small capital and the only way he has managed to get on at all, is by organizing, and by getting the attention of a few people at the top. Now that the moral sense of the world has become quickened, and that rapid transit and newspapers and science and the fact-spirit have gained their hold, the sins of the world are being rapidly distributed, not so much among the men who determine things as among those who cannot.
Everything is following the fact-spirit. The modern world and everything in it, is falling into the hands of the men who cannot be cheated about facts, who get the facts first and who get them right.
The world cannot help falling, from now on, slowly—a little ponderously perhaps at first—into the hands of good men. To say that the world is falling into the hands of men who cannot be cheated and to say that it is falling into the hands of good men is to say the same thing.
The men who get the things that they want, get them by seeing the things as they are. Goodness and efficiency both boil down to the same quality in the modern man, his faculty for not being a romantic person and for not being cheated.
A good man may be said to be a man who has formed a habit, an intimate personal habit of not being cheated. Everything he does is full of this habit. The sinful man, as he is usually called, is a man who is off in his facts, a man who does not know what he really wants even for himself. In a matter-of-fact civilization like ours, he cannot hope to keep up. If a man can be cheated, even by himself—of course other people can cheat him and everybody can take advantage of him. He naturally grows more incompetent every day he lives. The men who are slow or inefficient in finding out what they really want and slow in dealing with themselves are necessarily inefficient and behind hand in dealing with other people. They cannot be men who determine what other people shall do.
It is true that for the moment, it still seems—now that science has only just come to the rescue of religion, that evil men in a large degree are the men who still are standing in the gate and determining opportunities and letting in and letting out Civilization as they please. But their time is limited.
The fact-spirit is in the people. We enjoy facts. Facts are the modern man's hunting, his adventure and sport. The men who are ahead are getting into a kind of two-and-two-are-four habit that is like music, like rhythm. It becomes almost a passion, almost a self-indulgence in their lives. Being honest with things, having a distaste for being cheated by things, having a distaste for being cheated by one's self and for cheating other people, runs in the blood in modern men. The nations can be seen going round and round the earth and looking one another long and earnestly in the eyes. The poet is turning his imagination upon the world about him and upon the fact that really works in it. The scientific man has taken hold of religion and righteousness is being proved, melted down in the laboratory, welded together before us all and riveted on to the every day, on to what really happens, and on to what really works. Goodness in its baser form already pays. Only the biggest men may have found it out, but everybody is watching them. The most important spiritual service that any man can render the present age is to make goodness pay at the top (in the most noticeable place) in some business where nobody has made it pay before. Anybody can see that it almost pays already, that it pays now here, now there. At all events, anybody can see that it is very noticeable that the part of the world that is most spiritual is not merely the part that is whining or hanging on crosses. It is also the part that is successful. One knows scores of saints with ruddy cheeks. It is getting to be a matter of principle almost in a modern saint—to have ruddy cheeks.
I submit this fact respectfully to Bernard Shaw, Wall Street, Downing Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, and even to the New York Sun, that vast machine for laughing at a world down in its snug quarters in Park Row—that the saint with ruddy cheeks is a totally new and disconcerting fact in our modern life. He is the next fact the honest pessimist will have to face.
I submit that this saint with ruddy cheeks is here, that he is lovable, imperturbable, imperious, irrepressible, as interesting as sin, as catching as the Devil and that he has come to stay.
He stays because he is successful and can afford to stay.