he sort of world that could do such things.

It is Non's religion not to believe every morning as he goes down to his
office that he is in a mean world, a world that would want to crucify
him for doing his work as well as he could.

Perhaps this was the spirit of the first Cross, too. We have every
reason to believe that if Christ could have come back in the flesh three
days after the crucifixion and lived thirty-three years longer in it, he
would have occupied himself exclusively in standing up for the world
that had crucified him, in saying that it was a small party in a small
province that did it, that it was temporary and that they did it because
they were in a hurry.

It was not Christ, but the comparatively faint-believing, worldly minded
saints that have enjoyed dying on crosses since, who have been proud of
being martyrs.

Among those who have tried the martyr way of doing things Jesus is
almost the only one who has not in his heart abused the world. Most
martyrs have made a kind of religion out of not expecting anything of it
and of trying to get out of it. "And ye, all ye people, are ye suitable
or possible people for me to be religious with?" the typical martyr
exclaims to all the cities, to all the inventors, to the scientists and
to the earth-redeemers, to his neighbours and his fellow men. It was
not until science in the person of Galileo came to the rescue of
Christianity and began slowly to bring it back to where Christ started
it--as a noble, happy enterprise of standing up for this world and of
asserting that these men who were in it are good enough to be religious
here and to be the sons of God now--that Christianity began to function.
Religion has been making apparently a side trip for nearly twelve
hundred years, a side trip into space or into the air or into the grave
for holiness for the eternal, and for the infinite.

Doubtless very often people on crosses really have been holier than the
people who knew how to be good without being crucified. Sometimes it has
been the other way. It would have been just as holy in Non to make the
gospel work in New York as to make a blaze, a show or advertisement of
how wicked the world was, and of how inefficient the gospel was--by
going into insolvency.

He has had his cross, but instead of dying on it, he has taken it up and
carried it. Scores of risks and difficulties that he has grappled with
would have become crosses at once if equally good, but less