about
itself, it thinks it is It.

It is not It yet.

The earth and everything on it is a huge Acorn, tumbling softly through
the sky.

Our boasted Christianity (crosses, and resurrections and cathedrals and
all) is a Child crying in the night.

* * * * *

It is not necessary for me to prove to the satisfaction of the New York
_Sun_ and Bernard Shaw that the Golden Rule has not reached the superior
moral stage of being taken as a platitude by all of our people who are
engaged in business. It is enough to submit that the most creative and
forceful business men--the men who set the pace, the foremen of the
world, are taking it so, and that others are trying to be as much like
them as they can. Wickedness in this world is not going to stop with a
jerk. It is merely being better distributed. Possibly this is all there
is to the problem, getting sin better distributed. The Devil has never
had a very great outfit or any great weight, but he has always known
where to throw it, and he has always done an immense business on a small
capital and the only way he has managed to get on at all, is by
organizing, and by getting the attention of a few people at the top. Now
that the moral sense of the world has become quickened, and that rapid
transit and newspapers and science and the fact-spirit have gained their
hold, the sins of the world are being rapidly distributed, not so much
among the men who determine things as among those who cannot.

Everything is following the fact-spirit. The modern world and everything
in it, is falling into the hands of the men who cannot be cheated about
facts, who get the facts first and who get them right.

The world cannot help falling, from now on, slowly--a little ponderously
perhaps at first--into the hands of good men. To say that the world is
falling into the hands of men who cannot be cheated and to say that it
is falling into the hands of good men is to say the same thing.

The men who get the things that they want, get them by seeing the things
as they are. Goodness and efficiency both boil down to the same quality
in the modern man, his faculty for not being a romantic person and for
not being cheated.

A good man may be said to be a man who has formed a habit, an intimate
personal habit of not being cheated. Everything he does is full of this
habit. The sinful man, as he is usually called, is a man who is off in
his facts, a man who does not know w