Excerpt from Why Callest Thou Me Good?

But we do not need to examine diseases so much as we need to examine health. If doctors studied health more therewould be less disease to study. We do not need to analyze crime as much as we need to scrutinize goodness. If goodness were real crime would soon be a vanishing quantity. The trouble with ministers is not that they do not understand sin: it is that they do not understand virtue. He whom most of our ministers claim as Master was not concerned with the crimes of His day He was concerned over the goodness of His day. Jesus did not attack the vice of His time, He attacked the virtue of His time. At no point is the common misunderstanding of Him more pro found today.

I did not say that doctors needed to admire health more, though what I said will be so understood by many at the first reading. They admire hea'lth too much now, that is such health as we have. If they were not so soon satisfied with a superficial physical well - being most diseases would be defeated before they were ever manifested. Neither would I be understood as stand ing for a minute for that easy moral complacency which is con tent to approve ordinarily nice and decent living and ignore the doings of the disreputable, except in a coercive. Legal way. It is exactly this attitude which I fear and detest. Mere admiration of goodness is the last mood in the world that we need. What I do mean to say is that more than a better understanding of crime. However' important that may be, we need a better under standing oi what we commonly call morality. And that if we were sound in our thinking about morality there would soon be little need to think about crime. It is because we have not gotten hold of what goodness is that we are trying so hard to under stand what evil is. And though there may be large benefit in this, both the world and the church are going at the thing from the wrong end.

The church has always made too much of sin, though in a different way from that in which the misnamed muck-rakers of our time have undertaken to save the world. The muck' rakers have dealt with social. The church has dealt more with individual sin. The muck-rakers have handled wrong-doing in the present, and in the concrete, the church has handled evil in its origin, and in its mature more. But both have emphasized and do emphasize rather the negative than the affirmative side of life. And both have failed in the main to see that the real trouble is not with the badness, but with the goodness of men. Iesus saw this and said it. And therefore the good people of His day put him to death.

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