ues in
failure.

It believes that goodness is for crowds. It has discovered that crosses,
to common people in common things, seem oriental and mystical. The
common people of the western world instead of being born with dreamy
imaginations are born with pointed and applied ones. It is not
impossible that the comparative failure of the Christian religion in the
western world and in the later generations is that it has been trying to
be oriental and aristocratic in appealing to what is really a new type
of man in the world--the scientific and practical type as we see it in
the western nations all about us to-day.

We can die on crosses in our Western world as well as any one and we can
do it in crowds too as they do in India, but we propose if crosses are
expected of us to know why in crowds. Knowing why makes us think of
things and makes us do things. It is the keynote of our temperament.

And it is not fair to say of us when we make this distinction that we do
not believe in the cross. But there are times when some of us wish that
we could get other people to stop believing in it. We would all but die
on the cross to get other people to stop dying on one for platitudes, to
get them to work their way down to the facts and focus their minds on
the practical details of not dying on a cross, of forming a vision of
action which will work. It goes without saying that as long as crowds
are in the world crosses will not go by, but it is wicked not to make
them go by as fast as possible, one by one. They were meant to be moved
up higher. We are eager not to die on the same cross for the same thing
year after year and century after century. It seems to us that the
eagerness that always goes with the cross always was and always will be
the essential, powerful and beautiful thing in it.

And it is this new eagerness in the modern spirit, a kind of hurrying up
of the souls of the world that is inspiring us to employ our western
genius in inventing and defending and applying the means of goodness and
in finding ways of making goodness work. We will not admit that men were
intended to die on crosses from a sheer, beautiful, heavenly
shiftlessness, vague-mindedness, mere unwillingness to take pains to
express themselves or unwillingness to think things out and to make
things plain to crowds. It does not seem to us that it is wicked to
employ success as well as failure, to state our religion to people. It
seems to us that it goes nat