urally with the scientific and technical
temperament of the people that we should do this. It is not superior and
it is not inferior. It is temperamental and it is based upon the study
of the psychology of attention, on a knowledge of what impresses a
certain kind of man and of what really is conclusive with crowds and
with average men and women. It is the distinctive point of view of the
pragmatic temperament, of the inductive mind. The modern mind is
interested in facts and cannot make a religion out of not knowing them.
There was a time once when people used to take their bodily diseases as
acts of God. We have made up our minds not to have these same bodily
diseases now. We have discovered by hard work and constant study that
they are not necessary. The same is true of our moral diseases and of
our great social maladies.

It is going to be the same with crosses. It is a sin and a slander and
affront to human nature and to God to die on a cross if it can be helped
by hard work and close thinking, or by touching the imaginations of
others.

Most of us acting in most things are not good enough to die on crosses.
We are not worthy, it would not be humble in us to. Crosses are only
reserved for the newest and most rare truths, and for the newest and
most rare men. They are still, and they still can be made to be, a means
of grace and of perfection to people who have gifts of learning things
by suffering, but as a means of making other people and people in crowds
see things, the right to use a cross is not for those of us who are
merely lumbering spiritually along, trying to catch up to a plain,
simple-hearted old platitude, eighteen hundred years late like the
Golden Rule. The right to a cross is reserved for those who are up on
the higher reaches, those great bleak stretches or moors of truth where
men go forth and walk alone with God hundreds of years ahead.

CHAPTER XVI

THE MEN AHEAD PULL

Writing a hopeful book about the human race with the New York _Sun_,
Wall Street, Downing Street and Bernard Shaw looking on is uphill work.

Sometimes I wish there were another human race I could refer to when I
am writing about this one, one every one knows. The one on Mars, for
instance, if one could calmly point to it in the middle of an argument,
shut people off with a wave of one's hand and say, "Mars this" and "Mars
that" would be convenient.

The trouble with the human race is that when one is talking to it