or the spiritual address to know
or to think of a soft answer that would do it.

The spirit of fighting evil with good--a kind of glorious self-will for
goodness, for doing a thing the higher and nobler way and making it
work, the spirit of successful implacably efficient righteousness is the
last and most modern interpretation of the New Testament, the crowd's
latest cry to its God. Crowds will always crucify and crosses will never
go by. But we are going to have a higher ideal for crosses. We are not
going (out of sheer shame for the world), to think seriously any longer
of dying on a cross, or letting any one else die on one for a little
rudimentary platitude, a quiet, sensible, everyday business motto for
any competent business man like "Do unto others as you would have them
do unto you."

CHAPTER XIII

IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE SUCCESSFUL?

We are having and are about to have notably and truly successful men who
have the humility and faithfulness, the spiritual distinction of true
and great success.

I want to interpret, if I can, these men. I would like to put with the
great martyrs, with the immortal heroes of failure, these modern silent,
unspoken, unsung mighty men, the heroes of success. I look forward to
seeing them placed among the trophies of religion, in the heart of
mankind at last.

I cannot stand by and watch these men being looked upon by good people
as men the New Testament made no room for, secretly disapproved of by
religious men and women, as being successes, as being little, noisy,
disturbing, contradictions of the New Testament as talking back to the
Cross.

These things I have been trying to say about the Cross as a means of
expressing goodness to crowds have brought me as time goes on into close
quarters with many men to whom I pay grateful tribute, men of high
spirit, who strenuously disagree with me.

I am not content unless I can find common ground with men like these.

They are wont to tell me when we argue about it that whatever I may be
able to say for success as a means of touching the imaginations of
crowds with goodness, great or attractive or enthralling characters are
not produced by success. Success does not produce great characters. It
is now and always has been failure that develops the characters of the
men who a truly great.

Perhaps failure is not the only way.

* * * * *

When I was talking with ---- a little while