It was not Christ, but the comparatively faint-believing, worldly minded saints that have enjoyed dying on crosses since, who have been proud of being martyrs.

Among those who have tried the martyr way of doing things Jesus is almost the only one who has not in his heart abused the world.  Most martyrs have made a kind of religion out of not expecting anything of it and of trying to get out of it.  “And ye, all ye people, are ye suitable or possible people for me to be religious with?” the typical martyr exclaims to all the cities, to all the inventors, to the scientists and to the earth-redeemers, to his neighbours and his fellow men.  It was not until science in the person of Galileo came to the rescue of Christianity and began slowly to bring it back to where Christ started it—­as a noble, happy enterprise of standing up for this world and of asserting that these men who were in it are good enough to be religious here and to be the sons of God now—­that Christianity began to function.  Religion has been making apparently a side trip for nearly twelve hundred years, a side trip into space or into the air or into the grave for holiness for the eternal, and for the infinite.

Doubtless very often people on crosses really have been holier than the people who knew how to be good without being crucified.  Sometimes it has been the other way.  It would have been just as holy in Non to make the gospel work in New York as to make a blaze, a show or advertisement of how wicked the world was, and of how inefficient the gospel was—­by going into insolvency.

He has had his cross, but instead of dying on it, he has taken it up and carried it.  Scores of risks and difficulties that he has grappled with would have become crosses at once if equally good, but less resourceful men, had had them.  Letting one’s self be threatened with the cross a thousand times is quite as brave as dying on one once.  The spirit, or at least the shadow, of a cross must always fall daily on any life that is stretching the world, that is freeing the lives of other men against their wills.  The whole issue of whether there will be a cross or the threat of a cross turns on a man’s insight into human nature and his quiet and practical imagination concentrated upon his work.

Not dying on a cross is a matter of technique.  One sees how not to, and one does not.  It might be said that the world has two kinds of redeemers, its cross-redeemers and its success-redeemers.  The very best are on crosses, many of them.  Perhaps in the development of the truth the cross-redeemers come first; they are the pioneers.  Then come the success-redeemers, then everybody!

CHAPTER XIV

IS IT SECOND RATE FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE SUCCESSFUL?

Of course the most stupendous success that has ever been made—­the world’s most successful undertaking from a technical point of view as an adaptation of means to ends was the attempt that was made by a man in Galilee years and years ago to get not only the attention of a whole world, but to get the attention of a whole world for two thousand years.