The Cross, as a means of getting the attention of crowds, or of the more common people in our modern, practical-minded Western world, was apparently adapted to its purpose as long as it was used for church purposes or as long as it was kept dramatic or sensational or remote, or as long as it was a cross for some one else, but as a means of attracting the attention of crowds of ordinary men and women to goodness in common everyday things, it is very doubtful if failure—­in the power of steady daily pulling on men’s minds, has done as much for goodness as success.

It is doubtful if, except as an ideal or conventional symbol the cross has ever been or ever could be what might be called a spiritually middle-class institution.  It has been reserved for men of genius, pioneers and world-designers to have those colossal and glorious crosses that have been worshipped in all ages, and must be worshipped in all ages as the great memorials of the human race.

But the more common and numerous types of men, the men who do not design worlds, but who execute them, build them, who carry the new designs of goodness out, who work through the details and conceive the technique of goodness are men in whom the spiritual and religious power takes the natural form of success.

It seems to be the nature of the modern and the western type of man to challenge fatalism, to defy a cross.  He would almost boast that nobody could make him die on it.  This spirit in men too is a religious spirit.  It is the next hail of goodness.  Goodness posts up its next huge notice on the world: 

    [SUCCESS]

It is going to make the more rudimentary everyday people notice it, and it is going to make them notice it in everyday things.  It does not admit that goodness is merely for the spiritual aristocrats for those greater souls that can search out and appreciate the spiritual values in failure.

It believes that goodness is for crowds.  It has discovered that crosses, to common people in common things, seem oriental and mystical.  The common people of the western world instead of being born with dreamy imaginations are born with pointed and applied ones.  It is not impossible that the comparative failure of the Christian religion in the western world and in the later generations is that it has been trying to be oriental and aristocratic in appealing to what is really a new type of man in the world—­the scientific and practical type as we see it in the western nations all about us to-day.

We can die on crosses in our Western world as well as any one and we can do it in crowds too as they do in India, but we propose if crosses are expected of us to know why in crowds.  Knowing why makes us think of things and makes us do things.  It is the keynote of our temperament.