hod the people under him shall
conduct his bargains and deal with his customers. ----, at the head of
his department store, has a parish behind his counters of twenty-five
hundred men and women. He is in the business of determining their
religion, the way they make their religion work, eight hours a day, six
days a week. He seems to me to be engaged in the most ceaseless, most
penetrating, most powerful, and most spiritual activity of the world. He
is really getting at the imaginations of people with his idea of
goodness. If he does not work his way through to a man's imagination one
minute or one day, he does the next. If he cannot open up a man's
imagination with one line of goods, he does it with another. If he
cannot make him see things, and do as he would be done by, with one kind
of customer, another is moved in front of him presently, and another,
and another--the man's inner substance is being attacked and changed
nearly every minute every day. There is nothing he can do, or keep from
doing, in which his employer's idea of goodness does not surround,
besiege, or pursue him. Every officer of the staff, every customer who
slips softly up to the counter in front of him makes him think of the
Golden Rule in a new way or in some shading of a new way--confronts him
with the will, with the expectation, with the religion of his employer.

In ----'s store (where I looked in a moment yesterday) one thousand of
the two thousand five hundred clerks are men. If I were a minister
wondering nearly every day how to work in for my religion a fair chance
at men, I should often look wistfully from over the edge of my pulpit, I
imagine, to the head of ----'s department store, sitting at that quiet,
calm, empty looking desk of his in his little office at the top of his
big building in ---- Street, with nothing but those little six or seven
buttons he softly puts his thumbs on connecting him with a thousand
men.

And he does not even need the buttons. Every man knows and feels,
personally and intimately, what the man at the desk is asking him to do
with a particular customer who stands before him at the moment. As soon
as the customer is there, the man at the desk practically is there too.
His religion works by wireless, and goes automatically, and as from a
huge stored-up reservoir, to all that happens in the place. He makes
regularly with his idea of goodness anywhere from twenty to sixty
pastoral calls (with every sale they make)