And He then went on to tell them how much finer, and nobler and more free from the cares and weights of this earth they could be if they wanted to be, than they had dared to believe.  He told the people who were around Him bigger things about human nature, how successful it was or could be than any one had ever claimed for people in this world before.  They put Him up on a Cross at last and crucified Him because they thought He was too hopeful about them, and about human nature or because, as they would have put it, He was blasphemous and said every man was a Son of God.

As human nature then was and in the then spirit of the world, no better means than a Cross could have been employed to get the attention of all men, to make a two thousand year advertisement for all nations of what a success human nature was, of what men really could be like.

But I think that if Christ were to come to us again and if he were to try to get the attention of the whole world once more to precisely the same ideas and principles that he stood for before, the enterprise would be conducted in a very different manner.

There is a picture of Albert Durer’s which hangs near my desk, and once more as I write these lines my eyes have fallen on it.  It is the familiar one with the lion and the lamb in it, lying down together, and with the big room with the implements of knowledge scattered about in it and at the other end in the window at the table with a book, an old, bent-over scientist with a halo over his head.

If Christ were to appear suddenly in this modern world to-morrow, the first thing He would see and would go toward, would be the halo over the scientist’s head.

There is nothing especially picturesque or religious looking, nothing, at least, that could be put in a stained-glass window in Frederick Taylor’s tables and charts and diagrams of the number of foot-tons a pig-iron handler can lift with his arms in a day.

But if Christ returned to the world to-morrow and if what He wanted to do to-morrow was to get the universal, profound, convinced attention of all men to the Golden Rule, I believe He would begin the way Frederick Taylor did, by—­being concrete.  If He wanted to get men in general, men in business, to love one another He would begin by trying to work out some technical, practical way in which certain particular men in a certain particular place could afford to love one another.

He would find a practical way for instance for the employers and pig-iron handlers in the Midvale Steel Works to come to some sort of common understanding and to work cheerfully and with a free spirit together.  I think he would proceed very much in the way that Frederick Taylor did.

He would not say much about the Golden Rule.  He would give each man a vision for his work, and of the way it lapped over into other men’s work and leave the Golden Rule a chance to take care of itself.  This is all the Golden Rule, as a truth or as a remark needs just now.