This is our program.  We are making preliminary arrangements for a world in which after this, very soon now, righteousness is going to attend strictly to its own business and unrighteousness is going to be crowded out.  No one will feel that he has time in two or three hundred years from now to go out of his way into some obscure corner of the world and jump on the necks of the wicked.

But this is a matter of form.  The main fundamental manful instinct David had—­the idea that there should not be any more people dying on crosses than could be helped—­that collective society should take hold of Evil and set it down hard in its chair and make it cry seems to many of us absolutely sound.  Of course, we feel that it is not for us, those who love righteousness, to jump on the necks of the wicked.  We prefer to have it attended to in a more dignified, impersonal way by Society as a whole.  So we believe that Society should proceed to making goodness and honesty pay.  If Society will not do it we will do it.  The world may be against us at first but we will at least clear off a small place on it—­in our own business for instance—­where our goodness can command the most shrewdness and the most technique—­and we will do what we can slowly—­one industry at a time, to remove the slander on goodness that goodness is not inefficient, and the slander on the world that goodness cannot be self-supporting, self-respecting (and without disgrace), even comfortable in it.

The old hymn with which many of us are familiar is well and true enough.  But it does not seem that standing up for Jesus is the most important point in the world just now.  A great many people are doing it.  What we need more is people who will stand up for the world.  When people who are standing up for the world stand and sing “Stand up for Jesus” it will begin to count.  Let four hundred Nons sing it; and we will all go to church.

If nine of the people out of ten who are singing “Stand up for Jesus” would stand up for the world, that is, if they would stop trading with their grocer when they find he slides in regularly one bad orange out of twelve and promptly look up a grocer who does not do such things, and trade with him, it would not be necessary for people to do as they so often do nowadays, fall back on a little wistful half discouraged last resort like “standing up for Jesus.”

Standing up for the world means standing by men who believe in it, standing by men who make everything they do in business a declaration of their faith in God and their faith in the credit of human nature, men who put up money daily in their advertising, their buying and selling, on the loyalty, common sense, brains, courage, goodness, and righteous indignation of the people.