THE MAN WHO STANDS BY
I have been trying to say in this book that goodness in daily life, or
in business, in common world-running or world housekeeping, is by an
implacable crowd-process working slowly out of the hands of the wrong
men into the hands of the right ones.
If this is not true, I am ready to declare myself as a last resort, in
favour of a strike.
There is only one strike that would be practical.
I would declare for a strike of the saviours.
* * * * *
By a saviour I do not mean a man who stoops down to me and saves me. A
saviour to me is a man who stands by and lets me save myself.
I am afraid we cannot expect much of men who can bear the idea of being
saved by other people, or by saviours who have a stooping feeling.
I rejoice daily in the spirit of our modern laboring men, in that holy
defiance in their eyes, in the way they will not say "please" to their
employers and announce that they will save themselves.
The only saviour who can do things for labouring men is the saviour who
proposes to do things with them, who stands by, who helps to keep
oppressors and stooping saviours off--who sees that they have a fair
chance and room to save themselves.
I define a true saviour as a man who is trying to save himself.
It was because Christ, Savonarola, and John Bunyan were all trying to
save themselves that it ever so much as occurred to them to save worlds.
Saving a world was the only way to do it.
The Cross was Christ's final stand for his own companionableness, his
stand for being like other people, for having other people to share his
life with, his faith in others and his joy in the world.
The world was saved incidentally when Christ died on the Cross. He
wanted to live more abundantly--and he had to have certain sorts of
people to live more abundantly with. He did not want to live unless he
could live more abundantly.
We live in a world in which inventors want to die if they cannot invent
and in which Hewers want to die if they cannot hew.
I am not proud. I am willing to be saved. Any saviour may save me if he
wants to, if his saving me is a part of his saving himself.
If the inventor saves me and saves us all because he wants to be in a
world where an inventor can invent, wants some one to invent to; if the
artist saves me because it is part of his worship of God to have me
saved and wants to use me every day to rejoice about the world with--if
the Hewer comes over and hews out a place in the world for me because he
wants to hew, I am willing.
All that I demand is, that if a man take the liberty of being a saviour
to me that he refrain from stooping, that he come up to me and save me
like a man, that he stand before me and tell me that here is something
that we, he and I, shoulder to shoulder, can do, something that neither
of us could do alone. Then he will fall to with me and I will fall to
with him, and we will do it.
This is what I mean by a saviour.