It is not impossible that just at the present moment, and for some little time to come, there is really very little worth while that can be said about Christianity, until Christianity has been tried.  I cannot conceive of Christ’s coming back and saying anything just at the moment.  He would merely wonder why, in all these two thousand years, we had not arranged to do anything about what He had said before.  He would wonder how we could keep on so, making his great faith for us so poetic, visionary, and inefficient.

It is in the unconscious recognition of this and of the present spiritual crisis of the world, that our best men, so many of them, instead of going into preaching are going into laboratories and into business where what the gospel really is and what it is really made of, is being at last revealed to people—­where news is being created.

Perhaps it would not be precisely true—­what I have said, about Christ’s not saying anything.  He probably would.  But he would not say these same merely rudimentary things.  He would go on to the truths and applications we have never heard or guessed.  The rest of his time he would put in in proving that the things that had been merely said two thousand years ago, could be done now.  And He would do what He could toward having them dropped forever, taken for granted and acted on as a part of the morally automatic and of-course machinery of the world.

The Golden Rule takes or ought to take, very soon now, in real religion, somewhat the same position that table manners take in morals.

All good manners are good in proportion as they become automatic.  In saying that honesty pays we are merely moving religion on to its more creative and newer levels.  We are asserting that the literal belief in honesty, after this, ought to be attended to practically by machinery.  People ought to be honest automatically and by assumption, by dismissing it in business in particular, as a thing to be taken for granted.

This is what is going to happen.

Without the printing press a book would cost about ten thousand dollars, each copy.

With the printing press, the first copy of a book costs perhaps about six hundred dollars.

The second costs—­twenty-nine cents.

The same principle holds good under the law of moral automatics.

Let the plates be cast.  Everything follows.  The fire in the Iroquois
Theatre in Chicago cost six hundred dead bodies.

Within a few months outward opening doors flew open to the streets around a world.

Everybody knew about outward opening doors before.

They had the spirit of outward opening doors.  But the machinery for making everybody know that they knew it—­the moral and spiritual machinery for lifting over the doors of a world and making them all swing suddenly generation after generation the other way, had not been set up.

Of course it would have been better if there had been three hundred dead bodies or three dead bodies—­but the principle holds good—­let the moral plates be cast and the huge moral values follow with comparatively little individual moral hand labour.  The moral hand labour moves on to more original things.