Here is the factory over him, around him—­his own vast hockey team—­and over that is the nation, and over that is the world!

An employer can touch the imagination of most men, of the rank and file of the people, ninety-nine times where other people can touch it once.  And every time he touches it, he touches it to the point.

If men in general do not believe to-day in religion and do not want it, it is because they have employers who have not seen any place in their business where they could get their religion in, and have kept the people (in the one place where they could really learn what religion is) from learning anything about it.  The moment the more common employers see what the great ones see now, that business is the one particular place in this world where religion really works, works the hardest, the longest, and the best, works as it had never been dreamed a religion could be made to work before—­the day school teachers of the world, put the Golden Rule in the Course everybody will know it.

It only takes a moment’s thought to see what the employers of the world could do with the Golden Rule the moment they take hold of it.

One has but to consider what they have done with it already.

One has but to consider the astounding way in the last fifteen years they have made everybody not believe in it.

The employers of the world have been saying ten hours a day to everybody that the Golden Rule is a foolish, pleasant, inefficient, worsted motto on a parlour wall.

Everybody has believed it.

And now that the big employers are setting the pace and are saying exactly the opposite thing about the Golden Rule, now that all the employers are trying to get their employees to be efficient (to do by their employers as they would be done by), and now that they are trying to be efficient themselves (are trying to do to their employees as they would have their employees do to them), the Golden Rule is touching the imagination of crowds, and the crowd is seeing that the Golden Rule works.  They watch it working every day in the things they know about.  Then they believe in it for other things.

CHAPTER XII

THE NECKS OF THE WICKED

A letter lies before me, one out of many others asking me how the author of “The Shadow Christ,” which is a study of the religious values in suffering and self-sacrifice in this world, takes the low ground that honesty is the best policy.

I know two kinds of men who believe that honesty is the best policy.

These two men use exactly the same words “Honesty is the best policy.”

One man says it.

The other man sings it.

One man is honest because it pays.

The other man is honest because he likes it.

“Honesty is the best policy” as a motive cannot be called religious, but “Honesty is the best policy” as a Te Deum, as something a man sings in his heart every day about God, something he sings about human nature is religious, and believing it the way some men believe it, is an act of worship.