a sermon teasing people to be
good. They want to be good now; they envy the people that they see going
about the world not leaning on others to be good--self-poised,
independent, free, rich, spiritually self-supporting persons.

The men and women that we know may be more or less muddled in their
minds with philosophy or with theology, or perhaps they are being
deceived by expediency or being bullied by their environment, but they
are not wicked; they are out of focus, and what they desire when they go
to church on Sunday morning is to get a good look at beautiful and
refreshing things that they want, and for an hour and a half, if
possible, with slow steadied thought see their own lives in perspective.
It is a criminal waste of time to get hundreds of people to come into
church on a Sunday morning and seat them all together in a great room
where they cannot get out, and then tease them and tell them they ought
to be good. They knew it before they came. They are already agreed, all
of them, that they want to be good. They even want to be good in
business--as good as they can afford to. The question is how to manage
to do it. The thing that is troubling them is the technique. How can
they be good in their business--more good than their employers want them
to be, for instance--and keep their positions? Doing as one would wish
one had done afterward, or knowing what one is about, or "being good" as
it is sometimes called, is a thing that all really clever people have
agreed upon. They simply cannot manage some of the details--details like
time and place, a detail like being good now, for instance, or like
being good here. It is the more practical things like these that trouble
people, or they grow mixed in their thoughts about the big goods and the
little ones--which shall be first in order of importance or which in the
order of time. And when one sees that people are really like this in
their hearts, and when one sees them, all these poor, helpless people,
sitting cooped up in a church for an hour and a half being teased to be
good, it is small wonder that it seems, or is coming to seem, to the
clean-cut morally businesslike men and women we have to-day, a pitiful
waste of time.

* * * * *

I come to the second class of preachers I had in mind with more
diffidence. My feelings about them are not so simple and rudimentary as
my feelings about those who have teased me to be good.

Any man w