moments--little sudden bare spots or streaks of
abstraction--and I do not deny that there have been times when I could
not help feeling, as I sat listening, like sending around Monday morning
to the parsonage--my plumber. One could not help thinking what Dr. ----
if he once got started on a plumber like B---- (had had him around
working all the week during a sermon) could do with him.

I have a shoemaker, too, who would help most ministers. I imagine he
would point up their sermons a good deal--if they had his shoes on.

Perhaps shoes and pipes and things like these will be looked upon soon
to-day as constituting the great, slow, modest, implacable spiritual
forces of our time.

At all events, this is the most economical, sensible, thorough way (when
one thinks of it) that goodness can be advertised.

CHAPTER IX

TOUCHING THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS

A man's success in business to-day turns upon his power of getting
people to believe he has something that they want.

Success in business, in the last analysis, turns upon touching the
imagination of crowds. The reason that preachers in this present
generation are less successful in getting people to want goodness than
business men are in getting them to want motor-cars, hats, and pianolas,
is that business men as a class are more close and desperate students of
human nature, and have boned down harder to the art of touching the
imaginations of crowds.

When one considers what it is that touches a crowd's imagination and how
it does it, one is bound is admit that there is not a city anywhere
which has not hundreds of men in it who could do more to touch the
imagination of crowds with goodness than any clergyman could. A man of
very great gifts in the pulpit, a man of genius, even an immortal
clergyman, could be outwitted in the art of touching the imagination of
crowds with goodness by a comparatively ordinary man in any one of
several hundred of our modern business occupations.

There is a certain nation I have in mind as I write, which I do not like
to call by name, because it is struggling with its faults as the rest of
us are with ours. But I do not think it would be too much to say that
this particular nation I have in mind--and I leave the reader to fill in
one for himself, has been determined in its national character for
hundreds of years, and is being determined to-day--every day, nearly
every minute of every day, except when all the people are as