This purpose of arresting the attention of a world and of holding it for two thousand years was accomplished by the use of success and of failure alternately.

Christ tried success or failure according to which method (time and place considered) would seem to work best.

His first success was with the doctors.

His next success was based on His instinct for psychology, His power of divining people’s minds, which made possible to Him those extraordinary feats in the way of telling short stories that would arrest and hold the attention of crowds so that they would think and live with them for weeks to come.

His next success was a success based on the power of His personality, and His knowledge of the human spirit and his victory over His own spirit—­his success in curing people’s diseases and His extraordinary roll of miracles.

He finally tried failure at the end, or what looked like failure, because the Cross completed what he had had to say.

It made His success seem greater.

The world had put to death the man who had had such great successes.

People thought of His successes when they thought of Him on the Cross, and they have kept thinking of them for thousands of years.

But the Cross itself, or the use of failure was a sowing of the seed, a taking the truth out of the light and the sunshine and putting it in the dark ground.

The Cross was promptly contradicted with the Resurrection.  All this, it seems to some of us, is the most stupendous and successful undertaking from a purely technical point of view that the world has seen.  In the last analysis it was not His ideas or His character merely, but it was His technique that made Christ the Son of God and the Master of the Nations of the Earth.

* * * * *

I think that while Christ would not have understood Frederick Taylor’s technique, his tables of figures or foot-tons or logarithms he would have understood Frederick Taylor.

Nearly all the time that could be said to have been spent in his life in dealing with other men he spent in doing for them on a nobler scale the thing that Frederick Taylor did.  He went up to men—­to hundreds of men a day, that he saw humdrumming along, despising themselves and despising their work and expecting nothing of themselves and nothing of any one else and asked them to put their lives in his hands and let him show what could be done with them.

This is Frederick Taylor’s profession.

The Sermon on the Mount began with telling people that they would be successful if they knew how—­if they had a vision.  It proceeded to give them the vision.  It began with giving them a vision for the things that they had, told them how even the very things that they had always thought before were what was the matter with the world they could make a great use of.  “Blessed are the peacemakers.  Blessed are those that hunger; blessed are the meek.”