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 naturally 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.