ago about Non-Gregarious's
goodness and how it succeeded, he was afraid that if his goodness
succeeded there must have been something the matter with it.

I could see that he was wondering what it was.

Non's success troubled him. He did not think it was exactly religious.
"Real religion" he said, "was self-sacrifice. There always had to be
something of the Cross about real religion."

I said that Non's religion was touched at every point with the Cross.

It seemed to me that it was the spirit of eagerness in it that was the
great thing about the Cross. If Non would all but have died to make the
Golden Rule work in this world, if he daily faced ruin and risked the
loss of everything he had in this life to prove that the Golden Rule was
a success, that is if he really had a Cross and if he really faced
it--dying on it, or not dying on it, could not have made him one whit
more religious or less religious than he was. What Non was willing to
die for, was his belief in the world, and scores of good Christian
people tried in those early days of his business struggle to keep him
from believing in the world. There was hardly a day at first but some
good Christian would step into Non's office and tell him the world would
make him suffer for it if he kept on recklessly believing in it and
doing all those unexpected, unconventional, honest things that somehow,
apparently, he could not help doing.

They all told him he could not succeed. They said he was a failure. He
would suffer for it.

I would like to express if I can, what seems to be Non's point of view
toward success and failure.

If Non were trying to express his idea of the suffering of Christ, I
imagine he would say that in the hardest time of all when his body was
hanging on the Cross, the thing that was really troubling Christ was not
that he was being killed. The thing that was troubling him was that the
world really seemed, at least for the time being, the sort of world that
could do such things. He did not take his own cross too personally or
too literally as the world's permanent or fixed attitude toward goodness
or every degree of goodness. There was a sense in which he did not
believe except temporarily in his own cross. He did not think that the
world meant it or that it would ever own up that it meant it.

Probably if we had crosses to-day the hard part of dying on one would
be, not dying on it, but thinking while one was dying on it that one was
in t