United States or Senegal ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
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.
Non stepped in and proposed to represent a man's interest who is building a house as literally as the man would represent his interests himself, if he knew all about houses. Everything has followed from this. What Non's business is now, when a man is building a house, is to step quietly into the man's shoes, let him put on another pair, and go about his business.
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.
"Perhaps next week" I say to myself cheerfully "I can go down to New York and slip into Non's office and get the latest news as to how religion is getting on.
As a vulgar man is perpetually labouring to be genteel in like manner, the poetry of this man is always on the stretch to be grand. He has been allowed to look for a moment from the anti-chamber into the saloon, and mistaken the waving of feathers and the painted floor for the sine quâ non's of elegant society.
Perhaps failure is not the only way. When I was talking with a little while 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.
I do not know that there would be any special harm in speaking of Non's idea of just doing as you would be done by in more moral or religious language, but it is not necessary. And I find I take an almost religious joy in looking at the Golden Rule at last as a plain business proposition.
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.
If I wanted to make anybody religious, I would try to get him to work in Non's office, or work with anybody who ever worked with him, or who ever saw him; or I would have him live in a house built by him, or pay a bill made out by him.
I first made Non's acquaintance as our train pulled out of New York, and we found ourselves going down together on Friday afternoon to spend Sunday with M in North Carolina. The first thing he said was, when we were seated in the Pullman comfortably watching that big, still world under glass roll by outside, that he had broken an engagement with his wife to come.
Word Of The Day