One has but to consider the astounding way in the last fifteen years they have made everybody not believe in it. The employers of the world have been saying ten hours a day to everybody that the Golden Rule is a foolish, pleasant, inefficient, worsted motto on a parlour wall. Everybody has believed it. And now that the big employers are setting the pace and are saying exactly the opposite thing about the Golden Rule, now that all the employers are trying to get their employees to be efficient (to do by their employers as they would be done by), and now that they are trying to be efficient themselves (are trying to do to their employees as they would have their employees do to them), the Golden Rule is touching the imagination of crowds, and the crowd is seeing that the Golden Rule works. They watch it working every day in the things they know about. Then they believe in it for other things. CHAPTER XII THE NECKS OF THE WICKED A letter lies before me, one out of many others asking me how the author of "The Shadow Christ," which is a study of the religious values in suffering and self-sacrifice in this world, takes the low ground that honesty is the best policy. I know two kinds of men who believe that honesty is the best policy. These two men use exactly the same words "Honesty is the best policy." One man says it. The other man sings it. One man is honest because it pays. The other man is honest because he likes it. "Honesty is the best policy" as a motive cannot be called religious, but "Honesty is the best policy" as a Te Deum, as something a man sings in his heart every day about God, something he sings about human nature is religious, and believing it the way some men believe it, is an act of worship. It is like a great gentle mass. It is like taking softly up one's own planet and offering it to God. Here it is--the planet. Honesty is organized in the rocks on it and in the oak trees on it and in the people. The rivers flow to the sea and the heart of Man flows to God. On this one planet, at least, God is a success. Possibly it is because many other people beside myself have been slow in clearly making this distinction between "Honesty is the best policy" as a motive or a Te Deum, that I have come upon so many religious men and women in the last two or three years, who, in the finest spirit, have seemed to me to be doing all that they could to discourage everybody especially to discourage me, about the Golden Rule. The first objection which they put forward to the Golden Rule is that it is a failure. When I try to deal with this or try to tell them about Non-Gregarious, the second objection that they put forward is, that it is a success. If they cannot discourage me with one of these objections they try to discourage me with the other. They point to the Cross.