It does not call people out, in getting them to take up goodness, to point out to them nine places not to take hold of and one where they will be allowed to take hold, if they know how.

All that one has to do to see how true this is, is to observe the groups or classes of people who are especially not what they should be.  The people who never get on morally (as different as they may be in most things and in the fields of their activity) all have one illusion in common.  There is one thing they always keep saying when any new hopeful person tries once more to get them to be good.

They say (almost as if they had a phonograph) that they try to be good and cannot do it.

And this is not true.

When a man says he tries to be good and cannot do it, if he sits down and thinks it over he finds, generally, he is not trying to be good at all.  He is trying to be not bad.

A man cannot get himself reformed, by a negative process, by being not bad, and it is still harder for him and for everybody, when other people try to do it—­those who are near him, and it is still, still harder for a President down in Washington to do it.

An intelligent, live man or business corporation cannot be got to keep up an interest very long in being not bad.  Being not bad is a glittering generality.  It is like being not extravagant or economical.

Most people who have ever tried to attain in a respectable degree to a pale little neuter virtue like economy, and who have reflected upon their experiences, have come to conclusions that may not be very far from the point in a fine art like getting one’s self to be good or getting other people to be good.

To concentrate on being economical by going grimly down the street, looking at the shop windows, looking hard at miles of things one will not buy, cannot be said to be a practicable method of attaining economy.

The real artist, in getting himself to be good, proceeds to upon the opposite principle.  Even if the good thing he tries for is merely a negative good thing like economy, he instinctively seeks out some positive way of getting it.

A man who is cultivating the art of getting himself to be economical, or of getting his wife to be economical, does not make a start by sitting down with a pencil and making out a list, by concentrating his mind on rows of things that he and his family must get along without.  He knows a better way.  He goes downtown with his entire family, takes them into a big shop and sits down with them and listens to a Steinway Grand he cannot get.  As he listens to it long enough, he thinks he will get it.

Then a subtle, spiritual change passes over him and over his family while they listen.  He would not have said before he started that sitting down and thinking of things he could get along without—­making lists in his mind of things that he must not have—­could ever be in this world a happy, even an almost thrilling experience.  But as a matter of fact, as he sits by the piano and listens, he finds himself counting off economies like strings of pearls, and he greets each new self-sacrifice he can think of with a cheer.  While the Steinway Grand fills the room with melody all around him, there he actually is sitting, and having the time of his life dreaming of the things he can get along without!