be because there is something the matter with it, or
something the matter with the way it is displayed.

If the church shop windows, for instance, were to make displays of
goodness up and down the great Moral Fifth Avenue of the world--well,
one does not know; but there are some of us who would rather expect to
see the Goodness Display in the windows consisting largely of Things
People Ought Not to Want.

There would be rows and tiers of Not-Things piled up--Things for People
Not to Be, and Things for People Not to Do.

Goodness displayed in this way is not interesting. Perhaps this is one
of the reasons why the word Goodness spoils a thing for people--so many
people--when it is allowed in it.

Possibly it is because we are apt to think of the good people, and of
the people who are being good, as largely keeping from doing something,
or as keeping other people from doing something--as negative. Their
goodness seems to consist in being morally accurate, and in being very
particular just in time, and in a kind of general holding in.

We do not naturally or off-hand--any of us--think of goodness as having
much of a lunge to it. It is tired-looking and discouraged, and pulls
back kindly and gently. Or it teases and says, "Please"--God knows how
helpless it is, and I for one am frank to say that, as far as I have
observed, He has not been paying very much attention to good people of
late.

I do not believe I am alone in this. There must be thousands of others
who have this same half-guilty, half-defiant feeling of suspiciousness
toward what people seem to think should be called goodness. Not that we
say anything. We merely keep wondering--we cannot see what it is,
exactly, about goodness that should make it so depressing.

In the meantime we hold on. We do not propose to give up believing in
it. Perhaps, after all, all that is the matter with goodness in the
United States is the people who have taken hold of it.

They do not seem to be the kind of people who can make it interesting.
We cannot help thinking, if these same bad people about us, or people
who are called bad, would only take up goodness awhile, how they would
make it hum!

I can only speak for one, but I do not deny that when I have been
sitting (in some churches), or associating, owing to circumstances, with
very good people a little longer than usual, and come out into the
street, I feel like stepping up sometimes to the first fine, brisk,
businessl