This has been brought to pass because the employer has been thought of, or has thought of himself, who engages and pays for in clerks the highest qualities in human nature that he can get.  He picks out and puts in power, and persuades to be clerks, people who would have felt superior to it in days gone by—­men and women who habitually depend for their efficiency in showing and selling goods upon their more generous emotions and insights, their imaginations about other people.  They gather in their new customers, and keep up their long lists of old and regular customers, through shrewd visions of service to people, and through a technical gift for making the Golden Rule work.

When one looks at it practically, and from the point of view of all the consequences, a bargain is the most spiritual, conclusive, most self-revealing experience that people can have together.  Every bargain is a cross-section in three tenses of a man.  A bargain tells everything about people—­who they are, and what they are like.  It also tells what they are going to be like unless they take pains; and it tells what they are not going to be like too sometimes, and why.

The man who comes nearest in modern life to being a Pope, is the man who determines in what spirit and by what method the people under him shall conduct his bargains and deal with his customers. ——­, at the head of his department store, has a parish behind his counters of twenty-five hundred men and women.  He is in the business of determining their religion, the way they make their religion work, eight hours a day, six days a week.  He seems to me to be engaged in the most ceaseless, most penetrating, most powerful, and most spiritual activity of the world.  He is really getting at the imaginations of people with his idea of goodness.  If he does not work his way through to a man’s imagination one minute or one day, he does the next.  If he cannot open up a man’s imagination with one line of goods, he does it with another.  If he cannot make him see things, and do as he would be done by, with one kind of customer, another is moved in front of him presently, and another, and another—­the man’s inner substance is being attacked and changed nearly every minute every day.  There is nothing he can do, or keep from doing, in which his employer’s idea of goodness does not surround, besiege, or pursue him.  Every officer of the staff, every customer who slips softly up to the counter in front of him makes him think of the Golden Rule in a new way or in some shading of a new way—­confronts him with the will, with the expectation, with the religion of his employer.

In ——­’s store (where I looked in a moment yesterday) one thousand of the two thousand five hundred clerks are men.  If I were a minister wondering nearly every day how to work in for my religion a fair chance at men, I should often look wistfully from over the edge of my pulpit, I imagine, to the head of ——­’s department store, sitting at that quiet, calm, empty looking desk of his in his little office at the top of his big building in ——­ Street, with nothing but those little six or seven buttons he softly puts his thumbs on connecting him with a thousand men.