The idea that goodness is sweet and helpless and that Jesus was meek and lowly and has to be stood up for is now and always has been a slander.  It does not seem to some of us that He would want to be stood up for and we do not like the way some people call Him meek and lowly.  It would be more true to say that He merely looks meek and lowly; that is, if most men had done or not done or had said or not said things in the way he did, they would have been considered meek and lowly for it.  He had a way of using a soft answer to turn away wrath.  But there was not anything really meek and lowly about his giving the soft answer.  No meek and lowly man would ever have thought of such a thing as turning away wrath with a soft answer.  He would have been afraid of looking weak.  He would not have had the energy or the honesty or the spiritual address to know or to think of a soft answer that would do it.

The spirit of fighting evil with good—­a kind of glorious self-will for goodness, for doing a thing the higher and nobler way and making it work, the spirit of successful implacably efficient righteousness is the last and most modern interpretation of the New Testament, the crowd’s latest cry to its God.  Crowds will always crucify and crosses will never go by.  But we are going to have a higher ideal for crosses.  We are not going (out of sheer shame for the world), to think seriously any longer of dying on a cross, or letting any one else die on one for a little rudimentary platitude, a quiet, sensible, everyday business motto for any competent business man like “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

CHAPTER XIII

IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE SUCCESSFUL?

We are having and are about to have notably and truly successful men who have the humility and faithfulness, the spiritual distinction of true and great success.

I want to interpret, if I can, these men.  I would like to put with the great martyrs, with the immortal heroes of failure, these modern silent, unspoken, unsung mighty men, the heroes of success.  I look forward to seeing them placed among the trophies of religion, in the heart of mankind at last.

I cannot stand by and watch these men being looked upon by good people as men the New Testament made no room for, secretly disapproved of by religious men and women, as being successes, as being little, noisy, disturbing, contradictions of the New Testament as talking back to the Cross.

These things I have been trying to say about the Cross as a means of expressing goodness to crowds have brought me as time goes on into close quarters with many men to whom I pay grateful tribute, men of high spirit, who strenuously disagree with me.

I am not content unless I can find common ground with men like these.

They are wont to tell me when we argue about it that whatever I may be able to say for success as a means of touching the imaginations of crowds with goodness, great or attractive or enthralling characters are not produced by success.  Success does not produce great characters.  It is now and always has been failure that develops the characters of the men who a truly great.