man's interest who is building a house as literally as the man would represent his interests himself, if he knew all about houses. Everything has followed from this. What Non's business is now, when a man is building a house, is to step quietly into the man's shoes, let him put on another pair, and go about his business. It is not necessary to go into the details. Any reader who has ever built a house knows the details. Just take them and turn them around.
What those of us who know Non best like about him is that he is a plain business man, and that he has acted in this particular matter without any fine moral frills or remarks. He has done the thing because he liked it and believed in it.
But the most efficient thing to me about Non is not the way he is making money out of saving money for other people, but the way the fact that he can do it makes people feel about the world. Whenever I have a little space of discouragement or of impatience about the world because it does not hurry more, I fall to thinking of Non. "Perhaps next week"—I say to myself cheerfully—"I can go down to New York and slip into Non's office and get the latest news as to how religion is getting on. Or he will take me out with him to lunch, and I will stop scolding or idealizing, and we will get down to business, and I will take a good long look into that steady-lighted, unsentimental face of his while he tells me across the little corner table at Delmonico's for three hours how shrewd the Golden Rule is, and how it works." Sometimes when I have just been in New York, and have come home and am sitting in my still study, with the big idle mountain just outside, and the great meadow and all the world, like some great, calm gentle spirit or picture of itself, lying out there about me, and I fall to thinking of Non, and of how he is working in wood and stone inside of people's houses, and inside of their lives day after day, and of how he is touching people at a thousand points all the weeks, being a writer, making lights and shadows and little visions of words fall together just so, seems, suddenly a very trivial occupation—like amusing one's self with a pretty little safe kaleidoscope, holding it up, aiming it and shaking softly one's coloured bits of phrases at a world! Of course, it need not be so. But there are moments when I think of Non when it seems so.
In our regular Sunday religion we do not seem to be quite at our best just now.
At least (perhaps I should speak for one) I know I am not.
Being a saint of late is getting to be a kind of homely, modest, informal, almost menial everyday thing. It makes one more hopeful about religion. Perhaps people who once get the habit, and who are being good all the week, can even be good on Sunday.
There are many ways of resting or leaning back upon one's instincts and getting over to one's religion or perspective about the world. Mount Tom (which is in my front yard, in Massachusetts) helps sometimes—with a single look.
When I go down to New York, I look at the Metropolitan Tower, the Pennsylvania Station, the McAdoo Tunnels, and at Non.
If I wanted to make anybody religious, I would try to get him to work in Non's office, or work with anybody who ever worked with him, or who ever saw him; or I would have him live in a house built by him, or pay a bill made out by him.
It has seemed to me that his succeeding and making himself succeed in this way is a great spiritual adventure, a pure religion, a difficult, fresh, and stupendous religion.
Now these many days have I watched him going up and down through all the empty reputations, the unmeaning noises of the world, living his life like some low, old-fashioned, modest Hymn Tune he keeps whistling—and I have seen him in fear, and in danger, and in gladness being shrewder and shrewder for God, now grimly, now radiantly, hour by hour, day by day getting rich with the Holy Ghost!
CHAPTER III
IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE INTERESTING?
People are acquiring automobiles, Oriental rugs, five-hundred-dollar gowns, more rapidly just now than they are goodness, because advertisements in this present generation are more readable than sermons, and because the shop windows on Fifth Avenue can attract more attention than the churches. The shop windows make people covetous.
If the goodness that one sees, hears about, or goes by does not make other people covetous, does not make them wish they had it or some just like it, it must be because there is something the matter with it, or something the matter with the way it is displayed.
If the church shop windows, for instance, were to make displays of goodness up and down the great Moral Fifth Avenue of the world—well, one does not know; but there are some of us who would rather expect to see the Goodness Display in the windows consisting largely of Things People Ought Not to Want.
There would be rows and tiers of Not-Things piled up—Things for People Not to Be, and Things for People Not to Do.
Goodness displayed in this way is not interesting. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the word Goodness spoils a thing for people—so many people—when it is allowed in it.
Possibly it is because we are apt to think of the good people, and of the people who are being good, as largely keeping from doing something, or as keeping other people from doing something—as negative. Their goodness seems to consist in being morally accurate, and in being very particular just in time, and in a kind of general holding in.
We do not naturally or off-hand—any of us—think of goodness as having much of a lunge to it. It is tired-looking and discouraged, and pulls back kindly and gently. Or it teases and says, "Please"—God knows how helpless it is, and I for one am frank to say that, as far as I have observed, He has not been paying very much attention to good people of late.
I do not believe I am alone in this. There must be thousands of others who have this same half-guilty, half-defiant feeling of suspiciousness toward what people seem to think should be called goodness. Not that we say anything. We merely keep wondering—we cannot see what it is, exactly, about goodness that should make it so depressing.
In the meantime we hold on. We do not propose to give up believing in it. Perhaps, after all, all that is the matter with goodness in the United States is the people who have taken hold of it.
They do not seem to be the kind of people who can make it interesting. We cannot help thinking, if these same bad people about us, or people who are called bad, would only take up goodness awhile, how they would make it hum!
I can only speak for one, but I do not deny that when I have been sitting (in some churches), or associating, owing to circumstances, with very good people a little longer than usual, and come out into the street, I feel like stepping up sometimes to the first fine, brisk, businesslike man I see going by, and saying, "My dear sir, I do wish that you would take up goodness awhile and see if, after all, something cannot really be done. I keep on trying to be hopeful, but these dear good people in here, it seems to me, are making a terrible mess of it!"
And, to make a long story short, Lim happened to be going by one day, and this practically is what I did. I had done it before with other business men in spirit or in a general way, but with him I was more particular. I went straight to the point. "Here are at least sixteen valuable efficient brands of goodness in America," I said, "all worth their weight in gold for a big business career, that no one is really using, that no one quite believes in or can get on the market, and yet I believe with my whole soul in them all,
