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