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. CHAPTER XV THE SUCCESSFUL TEMPERAMENT I also, Gentle Reader, have despised and do despise "success." I also have stood, like you, perhaps, and I am standing now in that ancient, outer court, where I can keep seeing every day The Little Great Men with all their funny trappings on,--their hoods, and their ribbons, and their train-bearers, drive up before us all and go in to The Great Door. I have gone by in the night and have heard the buzz of their voices there. I have looked, like you, up at the great lighted windows of Prosperity from the street. And in the broad daylight I have seen them too. I have stood on the curb in the public way with all the others and watched silently the parade of The Little Great go by. I have waited like you, Gentle Reader, and smiled or I have turned on my heel sadly, or wearily or bitterly or gayly and walked away down my own side street of the world and with the huzzahs of the crowd echoing faintly in my ears have gone my way. But I keep coming back to the curb again. I keep coming back because, every now and then among all the gilt carriages and the bowing faces in them, or among all the big yellow vans or cages with the great beasts of success in them, the literary foxes, the journalist-juggernauts, the Jack Johnsons of finance, the contented, gurgling, wallowing millionaires--I cannot help standing once more and looking among them, for one, or for possibly two, or three or four who may be truly successful men. Some of them are merely successful-looking. I often find as I see them more closely, that they are undeceived, or humble, or are at least not being any more successful-looking than they can help, and are trying to do better. They are the men who have defied success to succeed and who will defy it again and again. They are the great men. The great man is the man who can get himself made and who will get himself made out of anything he finds at hand.