hat he really wants even for
himself. In a matter-of-fact civilization like ours, he cannot hope to
keep up. If a man can be cheated, even by himself--of course other
people can cheat him and everybody can take advantage of him. He
naturally grows more incompetent every day he lives. The men who are
slow or inefficient in finding out what they really want and slow in
dealing with themselves are necessarily inefficient and behind hand in
dealing with other people. They cannot be men who determine what other
people shall do.

It is true that for the moment, it still seems--now that science has
only just come to the rescue of religion, that evil men in a large
degree are the men who still are standing in the gate and determining
opportunities and letting in and letting out Civilization as they
please. But their time is limited.

The fact-spirit is in the people. We enjoy facts. Facts are the modern
man's hunting, his adventure and sport. The men who are ahead are
getting into a kind of two-and-two-are-four habit that is like music,
like rhythm. It becomes almost a passion, almost a self-indulgence in
their lives. Being honest with things, having a distaste for being
cheated by things, having a distaste for being cheated by one's self and
for cheating other people, runs in the blood in modern men. The nations
can be seen going round and round the earth and looking one another long
and earnestly in the eyes. The poet is turning his imagination upon the
world about him and upon the fact that really works in it. The
scientific man has taken hold of religion and righteousness is being
proved, melted down in the laboratory, welded together before us all and
riveted on to the every day, on to what really happens, and on to what
really works. Goodness in its baser form already pays. Only the biggest
men may have found it out, but everybody is watching them. The most
important spiritual service that any man can render the present age is
to make goodness pay at the top (in the most noticeable place) in some
business where nobody has made it pay before. Anybody can see that it
almost pays already, that it pays now here, now there. At all events,
anybody can see that it is very noticeable that the part of the world
that is most spiritual is not merely the part that is whining or hanging
on crosses. It is also the part that is successful. One knows scores of
saints with ruddy cheeks. It is getting to be a matter of principle
almost i