ent they take hold of it.

One has but to consider what they have done with it already.

One has but to consider the astounding way in the last fifteen years
they have made everybody not believe in it.

The employers of the world have been saying ten hours a day to everybody
that the Golden Rule is a foolish, pleasant, inefficient, worsted motto
on a parlour wall.

Everybody has believed it.

And now that the big employers are setting the pace and are saying
exactly the opposite thing about the Golden Rule, now that all the
employers are trying to get their employees to be efficient (to do by
their employers as they would be done by), and now that they are trying
to be efficient themselves (are trying to do to their employees as they
would have their employees do to them), the Golden Rule is touching the
imagination of crowds, and the crowd is seeing that the Golden Rule
works. They watch it working every day in the things they know about.
Then they believe in it for other things.

CHAPTER XII

THE NECKS OF THE WICKED

A letter lies before me, one out of many others asking me how the author
of "The Shadow Christ," which is a study of the religious values in
suffering and self-sacrifice in this world, takes the low ground that
honesty is the best policy.

I know two kinds of men who believe that honesty is the best policy.

These two men use exactly the same words "Honesty is the best policy."

One man says it.

The other man sings it.

One man is honest because it pays.

The other man is honest because he likes it.

"Honesty is the best policy" as a motive cannot be called religious, but
"Honesty is the best policy" as a Te Deum, as something a man sings in
his heart every day about God, something he sings about human nature is
religious, and believing it the way some men believe it, is an act of
worship.

It is like a great gentle mass.

It is like taking softly up one's own planet and offering it to God.

Here it is--the planet. Honesty is organized in the rocks on it and in
the oak trees on it and in the people. The rivers flow to the sea and
the heart of Man flows to God. On this one planet, at least, God is a
success.

Possibly it is because many other people beside myself have been slow in
clearly making this distinction between "Honesty is the best policy" as
a motive or a Te Deum, that I have come upon so many religious men and
women in the last two or three years, who, in the fi