Most of us acting in most things are not good enough to die on crosses.  We are not worthy, it would not be humble in us to.  Crosses are only reserved for the newest and most rare truths, and for the newest and most rare men.  They are still, and they still can be made to be, a means of grace and of perfection to people who have gifts of learning things by suffering, but as a means of making other people and people in crowds see things, the right to use a cross is not for those of us who are merely lumbering spiritually along, trying to catch up to a plain, simple-hearted old platitude, eighteen hundred years late like the Golden Rule.  The right to a cross is reserved for those who are up on the higher reaches, those great bleak stretches or moors of truth where men go forth and walk alone with God hundreds of years ahead.

CHAPTER XVI

THE MEN AHEAD PULL

Writing a hopeful book about the human race with the New York Sun, Wall Street, Downing Street and Bernard Shaw looking on is uphill work.

Sometimes I wish there were another human race I could refer to when I am writing about this one, one every one knows.  The one on Mars, for instance, if one could calmly point to it in the middle of an argument, shut people off with a wave of one’s hand and say, “Mars this” and “Mars that” would be convenient.

The trouble with the human race is that when one is talking to it about itself, it thinks it is It.

It is not It yet.

The earth and everything on it is a huge Acorn, tumbling softly through the sky.

Our boasted Christianity (crosses, and resurrections and cathedrals and all) is a Child crying in the night.

* * * * *

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.