me so occupied criticising
myself and so lost in wondering how this something that he has and sees
just beyond us, just beyond him, just beyond me, can be had for other
people, and how I can have some of it for myself, that I forget to
criticise. He searches my soul, makes me a new being in my presence
before my eyes--that is, a new being toward some one subject, or some
one possibility in the world. He helps me while in his presence to
accomplish the supreme thing that one man can ever do for another. He
helps me to get my own attention. He makes me see a set of particular
things that I immediately, before his next sentence, am trying to find
means to do. He does not attract my attention toward what he wants, like
a preacher who teases; nor does he attract my attention to what God
wants, like the preacher with the charts of goodness. He succeeds in
attracting and holding down my attention to what I really want for
myself or others, and to what I propose to get.

The imagination of crowds is convinced only by men who have real genius
for expression, for making word-pictures of real things, men who have
what might be called moving-picture minds, and who are so picturesque
and vivid that when they talk to people about goodness they have seen,
everybody feels as if they had been there. It has to be admitted that
this type of preacher, who has a kind of genius, and has developed an
art form for expressing goodness in words, is necessarily an exceptional
man. And it is unreasonable and unfair in the public to expect a man to
get up in the pulpit and, with no costume and no accessories, merely
with a kind of shrewd holiness or divination into human nature, present
goodness so that we seem to be there. It is small wonder that a man who
finds he is expected to be a kind of combination of biograph, brother,
spiritual detective, and angel all in one, in order to do his work
successfully has days of feeling that he has joined the ranks of The
Impossible Profession.

CHAPTER VIII

MAKING GOODNESS HURRY

Perhaps it has leaked out to those who have been following these pages
thus far, that I am merely at best, if the truth were known, a kind of
reformed preacher.

I admit it. Many other people are. We began, owing to circumstances,
with the idea of getting people to take up goodness by talking about it.

But we have grown discouraged in talking to people about goodness. More
and more, year by year, we have made up our