Perhaps failure is not the only way.

* * * * *

When I was talking with ——­ a little while ago about Non-Gregarious’s goodness and how it succeeded, he was afraid that if his goodness succeeded there must have been something the matter with it.

I could see that he was wondering what it was.

Non’s success troubled him.  He did not think it was exactly religious.  “Real religion” he said, “was self-sacrifice.  There always had to be something of the Cross about real religion.”

I said that Non’s religion was touched at every point with the Cross.

It seemed to me that it was the spirit of eagerness in it that was the great thing about the Cross.  If Non would all but have died to make the Golden Rule work in this world, if he daily faced ruin and risked the loss of everything he had in this life to prove that the Golden Rule was a success, that is if he really had a Cross and if he really faced it—­dying on it, or not dying on it, could not have made him one whit more religious or less religious than he was.  What Non was willing to die for, was his belief in the world, and scores of good Christian people tried in those early days of his business struggle to keep him from believing in the world.  There was hardly a day at first but some good Christian would step into Non’s office and tell him the world would make him suffer for it if he kept on recklessly believing in it and doing all those unexpected, unconventional, honest things that somehow, apparently, he could not help doing.

They all told him he could not succeed.  They said he was a failure.  He would suffer for it.

I would like to express if I can, what seems to be Non’s point of view toward success and failure.

If Non were trying to express his idea of the suffering of Christ, I imagine he would say that in the hardest time of all when his body was hanging on the Cross, the thing that was really troubling Christ was not that he was being killed.  The thing that was troubling him was that the world really seemed, at least for the time being, the sort of world that could do such things.  He did not take his own cross too personally or too literally as the world’s permanent or fixed attitude toward goodness or every degree of goodness.  There was a sense in which he did not believe except temporarily in his own cross.  He did not think that the world meant it or that it would ever own up that it meant it.

Probably if we had crosses to-day the hard part of dying on one would be, not dying on it, but thinking while one was dying on it that one was in the sort of world that could do such things.

It is Non’s religion not to believe every morning as he goes down to his office that he is in a mean world, a world that would want to crucify him for doing his work as well as he could.

Perhaps this was the spirit of the first Cross, too.  We have every reason to believe that if Christ could have come back in the flesh three days after the crucifixion and lived thirty-three years longer in it, he would have occupied himself exclusively in standing up for the world that had crucified him, in saying that it was a small party in a small province that did it, that it was temporary and that they did it because they were in a hurry.