I said that I did not think that Christ would be tipped over by a house or lose his bearings with a human soul because he lived in a park.  I thought He would look him straight in the eyes.

“But Christ said, ‘He that loseth his life shall save it!’”

“Yes, but He did not intend it as a mere remark about people’s houses.”

It did not seem to me that Christ meant simply giving up to other people easy and ordinary things like houses or like money, but that He meant giving up to others our motives, giving up the deepest, hardest things in us, our very selves to other people.

“And so you really think that if Christ came and looked at this house and looked at me in it, He would not mind?”

“I do not know.  I think that after He had looked at your house He would go down and look at your factory, possibly.  How many men do you employ?”

“Sixteen hundred.”

“I think He would look at them, the sixteen hundred men, and then He would move about a little.  Very likely He would look at their wives and the little children.”

He thought a moment.  I could see that he was not as afraid of having Christ see the factory as he was of having Him see the house.

I was not quite sure but I thought there was a little faint gleam in his eye when I mentioned the factory.

“What do you make?” I asked.

He named something that everybody knows.

Then I remembered suddenly who he was.  He was one of the men I had first been told about in England, and the name had slipped from me.  He had managed to do and do together the three things one goes about looking for everywhere in business—­what might be called the Three R’s of great business (though not necessarily R’s). (1) He had raised the wages of his employees. (2) He had reduced prices to consumers. (3) He had reduced his proportion of profit and raised the income of the works, by inventing new classes of customers, and increasing the volume of the business.

He had found himself, one day, as most men do, sooner or later, with a demand for wages that he could not pay.

At first he told the men he could not pay them more, said that he would have to close the works if he did.

He was a very busy man to be confronted with a crisis like this.  The market was trouble enough.

One morning, when he was up early, and the house was all still and he was sitting alone with himself, the thought slipped into his mind that there had been several times before in his life when he had sat thinking about certain things that could not be done.  And then he had got up from thinking they could not be done and gone out and done them.

He wondered if he could not get up and go out and do this one.

As he sat in the stillness with a clear road before his mind and not a soul in the world up, the thought occurred to him, with not a thing in sight to stop it, that he had not really trained himself to be quite such an expert in raising wages as he had in some other things.