He has come to be deeply attracted by this idea of a religion for every man just where he is, fitted on patiently, cheerfully, to just where he is, every day all day, his glorious, still, practical, good-natured, godlike “I will” and “I won’t “—­or News about himself.

CHAPTER III

PRESIDENT WILSON AND MOSES

We are deeply interested in the United States just now, in seeing what will be the fate of President Wilson’s government in getting men to be good.  The fate of a government in 1913 may be said to stand on the government’s psychology or knowledge of human nature or of what might be called human engineering, its mastery of the principles of lifting over in great masses heavy spiritual bodies, like people, swinging great masses of people’s minds over as on some huge national derrick up on The White House, from one lookout on life to another.

There are certain aspects of human nature when power is being applied to it in this way, and when it is being got to be good, that may not be beside the point.

If one could drop in on a government and have a little neighbourly chat with it, as one was going by, I think I would rather talk with it (especially our government, just now), about Human Nature than about anything.

I would have to do it, of course, in what might seem to a government to be a plain and homely way.

I would ask the government what it thought of two or three observations I have come to lately about the way that human nature works, when people are getting it to be good.  What a government thinks about them might possibly prove before many months to be quite important to It.

The first observation is this: 

The reason that the average bachelor is a bachelor is that he spends the first forty-five years of his life in picking out women he will not marry.

Possibly it is because many people are following the same principle in trying to be good and in getting other people to be good that they make such poor work of it.

Possibly the main reason why there are so many wicked people or seem to be, in proportion, among the Hebrews in the Old Testament, is that Moses was a lawyer and that he tried to start off a great people with the Ten Commandments, that is, a list of nine things they must never do any more, and of one that they must.

Some of us who have tried being good, have noticed that when we have hit it off, being good (at least with us) consists in being focused, in getting concentrated, in getting one’s attention to what one really wants to do.

Moses’ idea when he started his government, the idea of getting people concentrated on not getting concentrated on nine things, was not conducive to goodness.  The fundamental principle Moses tried to make the people good with was a contradiction in terms.  It is a principle that would make wicked people out of almost anybody.  It is not a practicable principle for a government to rely on in getting people to be good.  It did not work with the people in the Old Testament and it has never worked with people since.