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.