The men and women that we know may be more or less muddled in their minds with philosophy or with theology, or perhaps they are being deceived by expediency or being bullied by their environment, but they are not wicked; they are out of focus, and what they desire when they go to church on Sunday morning is to get a good look at beautiful and refreshing things that they want, and for an hour and a half, if possible, with slow steadied thought see their own lives in perspective.  It is a criminal waste of time to get hundreds of people to come into church on a Sunday morning and seat them all together in a great room where they cannot get out, and then tease them and tell them they ought to be good.  They knew it before they came.  They are already agreed, all of them, that they want to be good.  They even want to be good in business—­as good as they can afford to.  The question is how to manage to do it.  The thing that is troubling them is the technique.  How can they be good in their business—­more good than their employers want them to be, for instance—­and keep their positions?  Doing as one would wish one had done afterward, or knowing what one is about, or “being good” as it is sometimes called, is a thing that all really clever people have agreed upon.  They simply cannot manage some of the details—­details like time and place, a detail like being good now, for instance, or like being good here.  It is the more practical things like these that trouble people, or they grow mixed in their thoughts about the big goods and the little ones—­which shall be first in order of importance or which in the order of time.  And when one sees that people are really like this in their hearts, and when one sees them, all these poor, helpless people, sitting cooped up in a church for an hour and a half being teased to be good, it is small wonder that it seems, or is coming to seem, to the clean-cut morally businesslike men and women we have to-day, a pitiful waste of time.

* * * * *

I come to the second class of preachers I had in mind with more diffidence.  My feelings about them are not so simple and rudimentary as my feelings about those who have teased me to be good.

Any man who travels about, or who drops into churches wherever he happens to be from Sunday to Sunday, is almost sure to find in every city of considerable size at least one imperious capable baffling clergyman.  If one is strictly honest and fair toward him, to say nothing of being a well-meant and hopeful human being who is living in the same world with him and who feels very imperfect too, finding any serious and honest fault with the sermon, or at least laying one’s finger upon what the fault is, seems to be almost impossible.  One simply comes out of the church in a nice, neat little glow of good-will and admiration, and with a strange, soothing, happy sense of new, fresh, convenient wisdom.

The only fair way to criticise the preacher who belongs in this class seems to be to take ten years for it, go in regularly and get a little practice every Sunday.  There are preachers who preach so well that the only way one can ever find what is the matter with their sermons is to sit quietly while they are preaching them, and look around at the people.  One thinks as one looks around, “These people are what this man has done.”