IS IT SECOND RATE FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE SUCCESSFUL?

Of course the most stupendous success that has ever been made-the world’s most successful undertaking from a technical point of view as an adaptation of means to ends was the attempt that was made by a man in Galilee years and years ago to get not only the attention of a whole world, but to get the attention of a whole world for two thousand years.

This purpose of arresting the attention of a world and of holding it for two thousand years was accomplished by the use of success and of failure alternately.

Christ tried success or failure according to which method (time and place considered) would seem to work best.

His first success was with the doctors.

His next success was based on His instinct for psychology, His power of divining people’s minds, which made possible to Him those extraordinary feats in the way of telling short stories that would arrest and hold the attention of crowds so that they would think and live with them for weeks to come.

His next success was a success based on the power of His personality, and His knowledge of the human spirit and his victory over His own spirit-his success in curing people’s diseases and His extraordinary roll of miracles.

He finally tried failure at the end, or what looked like failure, because the Cross completed what he had had to say.

It made His success seem greater.

The world had put to death the man who had had such great successes.

People thought of His successes when they thought of Him on the Cross, and they have kept thinking of them for thousands of years.

But the Cross itself, or the use of failure was a sowing of the seed, a taking the truth out of the light and the sunshine and putting it in the dark ground.

The Cross was promptly contradicted with the Resurrection.  All this, it seems to some of us, is the most stupendous and successful undertaking from a purely technical point of view that the world has seen.  In the last analysis it was not His ideas or His character merely, but it was His technique that made Christ the Son of God and the Master of the Nations of the Earth.

I think that while Christ would not have understood Frederick Taylor’s technique, his tables of figures or foot-tons or logarithms he would have understood Frederick Taylor.

Nearly all the time that could be said to have been spent in his life in dealing with other men he spent in doing for them on a nobler scale the thing that Frederick Taylor did.  He went up to men-to hundreds of men a day, that he saw humdrumming along, despising themselves and despising their work and expecting nothing of themselves and nothing of any one else and asked them to put their lives in his hands and let him show what could be done with them.

This is Frederick Taylor’s profession.

The Sermon on the Mount began with telling people that they would be successful if they knew how-if they had a vision.  It proceeded to give them the vision.  It began with giving them a vision for the things that they had, told them how even the very things that they had always thought before were what was the matter with the world they could make a great use of.  “Blessed are the peacemakers.  Blessed are those that hunger; blessed are the meek.”

And He then went on to tell them how much finer, and nobler and more free from the cares and weights of this earth they could be if they wanted to be, than they had dared to believe.  He told the people who were around Him bigger things about human nature, how successful it was or could be than any one had ever claimed for people in this world before.  They put Him up on a Cross at last and crucified Him because they thought He was too hopeful about them, and about human nature or because, as they would have put it, He was blasphemous and said every man was a Son of God.

As human nature then was and in the then spirit of the world, no better means than a Cross could have been employed to get the attention of all men, to make a two thousand year advertisement for all nations of what a success human nature was, of what men really could be like.

But I think that if Christ were to come to us again and if he were to try to get the attention of the whole world once more to precisely the same ideas and principles that he stood for before, the enterprise would be conducted in a very different manner.

There is a picture of Albert Durer’s which hangs near my desk, and once more as I write these lines my eyes have fallen on it.  It is the familiar one with the lion and the lamb in it, lying down together, and with the big room with the implements of knowledge scattered about in it and at the other end in the window at the table with a book, an old, bent-over scientist with a halo over his head.

If Christ were to appear suddenly in this modern world to-morrow, the first thing He would see and would go toward, would be the halo over the scientist’s head.

There is nothing especially picturesque or religious looking, nothing, at least, that could be put in a stained-glass window in Frederick Taylor’s tables and charts and diagrams of the number of foot-tons a pig-iron handler can lift with his arms in a day.

But if Christ returned to the world to-morrow and if what He wanted to do to-morrow was to get the universal, profound, convinced attention of all men to the Golden Rule, I believe He would begin the way Frederick Taylor did, by-being concrete.  If He wanted to get men in general, men in business, to love one another He would begin by trying to work out some technical, practical way in which certain particular men in a certain particular place could afford to love one another.

He would find a practical way for instance for the employers and pig-iron handlers in the Midvale Steel Works to come to some sort of common understanding and to work cheerfully and with a free spirit together.  I think he would proceed very much in the way that Frederick Taylor did.

He would not say much about the Golden Rule.  He would give each man a vision for his work, and of the way it lapped over into other men’s work and leave the Golden Rule a chance to take care of itself.  This is all the Golden Rule, as a truth or as a remark needs just now.

For two thousand years men have devoted themselves Sunday day after Sunday to saying over and over again that men should love one another.  The idea is a perfectly familiar one.  When Christ said it two thousand years ago, it was so original and so sensational that just of itself and as a mere remark it had a carrying power over the whole earth.

Everybody believes it now-that it is a true remark-but like a score of other remarks that have been made and some of the noblest Christ made, is it not possible that it has long since in its mere capacity of being a remark, gone by?  There is no one who has not heard about our loving one another.  The remark we want now is how we can do it.  This is the remark that Mr. Frederick Taylor has made.  It is not very eloquent.  It is a mere statement of fact.  It has taken him nearly thirty-three years to make it.

The gist of it is that for thirty-three years, the employers and the pig-iron handlers in the Midvale Steel Works, Pennsylvania, have been devoted to one another and to one another’s interests and acting all day every day as if of course their interests were the same, and it has been found that employees when their employers cooeperated with them could lift forty-seven tons instead of twelve and a half a day, and were getting 60 per cent. more wages.

Everybody listens.  Everybody sees at a glance that when it comes to making remarks about doing as one would be done by, this is the one remark that we have all been waiting to hear some one make for two thousand years.

The Cross or the last-resort type of religion was as far as St. Augustine or St. Francis in their world could get.  It was all that the Middle Ages were ready for or that could be claimed for people who had to live in ages without a printing press, in which no one in the crowd could expect to know anything and in which there were no ways of letting crowds know things.

To-day there is no reason why the Cross as a contrivance for attracting the attention of all people to goodness should be exclusively relied upon.

Possibly the Cross was intended, at the time, as the best possible way of starting a religion, when there was none, or possibly for keeping it up when there was very little of it.

But now that Christianity has been occupied two thousand years in putting in the groundwork, in laying down the principles of success, and in organizing them into the world, has been slowly making it possible with crowds that could not be long deceived for success to be decent.  The leaven has worked into human nature and Christianity has produced The Successful Temperament.

Success has become a spiritual institution.  In other words, the hour of the Scientist, of the man with a technique, of the man who sees how, the man of The Successful Temperament is at hand.

Everything we plan for the world, including goodness, from this day-must reckon with him-with the Man Who Sees How.