© 2002 Arthur Nash
© 2002 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
Excerpted from the book, “The Golden Rule in Business,” copyright 1923, this material has significance for Urantian scholars for three reasons. Part I of this excerpt chronicles Nash’s devotion to his church, and the misguided fundamentalism of the organization that resulted in his expulsion. In Part II he chronicles his spiritual rebirth. In one of the most remarkable testimonies to the practical values of the Golden Rule, Nash describes how he applied it to a failing business and watched it prosper and grow. It is inspiring to read the birth of personal religion in Nash by means of loving service — the great gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. Nash’s work may well have been a secondary human source for a key concept of the Urantia Papers, as we shall see.
Larry Mullins
In the year 1909, I took up my residence in Columbus, Ohio, and started to manufacture men’s clothing, to sell to the public direct. My business flourished right from the start. Pretty soon I had a dozen salesmen out on the road, and I began to make money. By the year 1913, my concern was standing pretty solidly on its feet. Then came the disastrous flood and I, together with many another man, found myself practically wiped out.
After this setback, I resolved to settle in Cincinnati. I was pretty close to the wall in those days-so close, indeed, that I had to obtain permission from my merchandise creditors to move my stock, and to find security for a note of seven hundred dollars I owed my bank. However, I got started, continued to make steady progress for three years, and in June, 1916, The A. Nash Company was organized, with a capital of . We had an office, cutting rooms, and a stock of goods. We cut the garments and farmed them out to be made up.
Meanwhile the World War continued its frightful work of devastation, and, as any reasoning human being could see, this country was surely, if slowly, drifting into it, we made no effort to develop the plant, electing to wait until the great struggle should be ended.
At this time The A. Nash Company was one of the smallest concerns in Cincinnati. As I have just intimated, we had no factory of our own. We had our place of business in the Power Building, and furnished floor space to a man who had joined up with us, and who made our garments under contract. A short while after the Armistice was concluded, this man came to me and said, “Mr. Nash, I have heard nothing of my mother and sisters since the outbreak of the war. I want to go back to Europe. Will you buy my shop?”
“Yes,” I replied, “under those conditions I will be glad to.”
So we bought out this man, took over his business and the people he employed, and for the first time his pay-roll came into my hands. Concerning this same payroll I want certain facts borne in mind. During the time America was engaged in the World War, business conditions in the clothing line in the city of Cincinnati were decidedly poor. Very few large government contracts were obtained by any of the firms located there, and no civilian clothes in any quantity were being bought, simply because all our young fellows were expecting almost daily, to be called upon to don the uniform of Uncle Sam. So workers were on the old, low wage scale, when I took over this business.
Another fact should be borne in mind, namely, that the shop we bought was literally a sweat-shop, and that sweat-shops are always made up of inefficient workers who cannot get a job in a highgrade shop. Wages in what are known as “inside shops,” run by the factories themselves, always start where the sweat-shop wages leave off; thus the wages that were being paid in this shop at the time we took it over, must not be confused with the wages paid in the inside shops of the large clothing manufacturers of Cincinnati.
In this shop were two workers that particularly attracted my attention. One was a tall, dignified old lady, close on to eighty years of age, who pulled out bastings and sewed on buttons. The other was a little hunchback who ran a machine. Both were on this payroll at $ 4.00 a week. Workers possessing a little more ability than they were supposed to possess, were receiving $ 5.00 and $ 6.00. The highest-paid woman in the shop was drawing $ 7.00. The pressers and “skilled” men were getting $ 18.00 a week. Such was the character of the wage-scale handed to me when The A. Nash Company became owners of their own factory.
I looked at that pay-roll and saw instantly that something stood between it and myself. It was the Golden Rule that recently I had been doing a good deal of talking about. I called my eldest son into conference and said to him, “Look at that pay-roll.” Now it must be remembered that the boy was just back from a soul-racking experience on the battlefields of Europe; that, as a result, he was in wretched health, and had not, as yet, begun to look at these matters as I had myself.
“Well, what of it?” he asked, as he scanned the paper.
“Just this,” I answered. “You have been with me in some of the meetings where I have talked recently, in behalf of Liberty Loans, and you know something of the firm conviction that has sprung up in my heart concerning what this world can become if we really live out the Golden Rule. Do you think that holding such a conviction that I can go into that shop next Saturday, and hand these people pay-envelopes with any such wages in them as that sheet indicates?”
“What else can you do?” my son retorted. “If you don’t, you knock yourself clean out. Yours is the same scale of wages that is being paid in all similar shops, and if you want to keep your end up, there is nothing you can do but stick to it.” Nor was thereat least it looked that way just then.
I went home and discussed the situation with my wife. My boy’s argument, taken at its face value, was sound enough. We were closing our fiscal year showing a loss of $ 4,000. Our original investment of $ 60,000 was shown by a recently taken inventory to have depreciated to $ 56,000. No; there appeared to be but one alternative: I had to carry on this clothing business and continue to mete out what I knew to be rank injustice-or get out of it. I decided to do the latter, and as there were only a few stock-holders besides myself, in the concern, I called them together the next morning and put the proposition up to them. They agreed to liquidate the company after I had promised to make good their loss, and return their investment. The most that I hoped to be able to do was to manage to get out with enough money to make a small first payment on a farm. As I said at the time: “There’s the only place where a man can really be a Christian. He certainly can’t be one in the clothing business.”
After this meeting with my fellow stock-holders I went into the factory, called my little group of workers together, and said something of this kind to them:
“Friends, you have heard no doubt that we have bought this shop, and I have come in to get acquainted with you. No doubt, too, you have heard a great deal about the talks that I have been giving during the War about Brotherhood and the Golden Rule, while pleading the cause of Christianity and its affiliation to my conception of true Democracy. Now I am going to do a bit of talking to you. First, I want you to know that Brotherhood is a reality with me. You are all my brothers and my sisters, children of the same great Father that I am, and entitled to all the justice and fair treatment that I want for myself. And so long as we run this shop, [which to me meant three or four months longer] God being my helper, I am going to treat you as my brothers and sisters, and the Golden Rule is going to be our only governing law. Which means that whatever I would like to have you do to me, were I in your place, I am going to do to you. Now,” I went on, “not knowing any of you personally, I would like you to raise your hands as I call your names.”
I read the first name. Under it was written: Sewing on buttons — $ 4.00 per week. I looked straight before me at the little group, but saw no hand. Then I looked to my right, and there saw the old lady I have referred to, holding up her trembling hand. At first I could not speak, because, almost instantly, the face of my own mother came between that old lady and myself. I thought of my mother being in such a situation, and of what, in the circumstances, I would want someone to do for her. I hardly knew what to say, because I was aware that when I went into the shop, that after agreeing to stand all of the loss entailed by the liquidation of the company, I could not go too far in raising wages. It seemed to be my obvious duty to salvage something for the boys who were coming home from military service, and for the daughter just entering the university. But as I looked at that old lady, and saw only my mother, I finally blurted out: “I don’t know what it’s worth to sew on buttons; I never sewed a button on. But your wages, to begin with, will be $ 12.00 per week.” That was a 300% raise. The next name on list was that of the little hunchback, whose wages were the same as those of the aged worker. But I had established a precedent and so had to give her a 300% increase also. And so I went on, through my entire wage-sheet, right up to the $ 18.00-a-week pressers, whose salaries I increased to $ 27.00.
Let it be borne in mind that I was not acting under the spell of some wondrous, compelling vision. I realized with perfect clearness that the granting of these increases meant, that every Saturday night, I would be taking just so many dollars as the increased pay-roll demanded, off the value of the farm I was proposing to buy. But I had reached a point in my thinking where I felt, that unless I was prepared to sacrifice every bit of laudable idealism I had in my soul, the thing had got to be gone through with. Having so far settled matters with my conscience and sense of equity, I began to look around for my farm. Beyond exercising some sort of general oversight, I ceased to pay much attention to the clothing business. Yet I became aware that, unmistakably, sales were picking up. This was because our soldier-boys were being demobilized, and a demand for civilian clothing accompanied the process.
Just at this time, I received news that a very dear friend of mine was in serous financial difficulties. He was a man on whom I set the highest value. He had a noble wife and two lovely daughters about the age of my own girl, and he was facing bankruptcy. So the Golden Rule began to get in its work again. “What can be done to help my friend,” I asked myself. To aid me in answering my own question, I went to see my bookkeeper-to find out how much ready money I could command. What the bookkeeper told me held me in absolute astonishment. I was simply astounded to find out how much money we had on hand. “What’s going on here?” I asked. “Are you selling goods by the yards?”
“No,” she answered, “but don’t you know we are doing almost three times the amount of business were doing at this time last year?”
“No, I do not-never dreamed such a thing. How is it being done? Where are you getting the garments made?”
“I think they are making them in the shop,” my bookkeeper answered. “I’ve had no bills sent to me for outside work.”
“That shop was running to full capacity when we bought it,” I said. “Have you bought a lot of extra machines?”
No; she had seen no bills for machines either. “But we are doing the business just the same,” she returned, “and the money is coming here, and we are depositing it in the bank.”
After the help had gone, I went down into the factory and talked to the forelady.
“What’s going on here?” I asked.
“Why —nothing,” she answered, “except that we’re making a lot of clothes.”
“The bookkeeper tells me you are making three times as many clothes as when we took the shop over. Is that a fact?”
“It is. I don’t know the figures,” she went on, "but I do know we are actually producing merchandise at less cost than before you increased the wages of the help. Take for instance, that old lady whose weekly salary you increased 300%. You should come in sometime and take a peep at her. Somehow, her poor, old, crippled fingers have got limbered up, a look of youth has come into her eyes, and she is doing twice the amount of work she ever did before.
“But the biggest thing of all in this shop,” she continued, “is the case of the skilled help, who at one time, were simply loafing on the job. They’ve got busy lately and are showing us all how to get work done. The garments are coming through in one constant stream.”
I felt completely at sea. “Do you mind telling me just what has brought all this about?” I asked the forelady.
“I hardly think I can,” she replied.
“Why?”
“Well, for one thing, the story would have to include some talk that possibly you wouldn’t care to hear.”
“Don’t mind me. Please go right on and tell me. I have heard some rather peculiar talk at one time and another. Just relate what has happened.”
“Well, it was something like this: After you left the shop on the day you announced your intention of raising wages, we all stood around for a few moments looking rather helplessly at each other. Presently the little Italian presser-you know him-blurted out: 'Well I’ll be dammed!”
“We all looked at him, and after a minute’s silence he went on: ”Whatever this Golden Rule thing is I don’t know, but what Mr. Nash told us was that all he wanted us to do was work just as we would want him to work if we were up in the office paying wages, and he was back here doing the work. Now I know, if I was the boss and would come in and talk to the workers as he did, and raise wages like he has, I’d want every one to work like hell!’
“There!” said the forelady. “That’s about all there is to it. Our people just caught the drift of Tony’s idea and went ahead in the spirit of it. That’s why we’ve trebled our output. If I talked for a week, I couldn’t tell you any more.”
Nor can I. That is how it all began. In a very short time we found ourselves unable to handle the volume of business which began to pour in. I soon lost all interest in the purchase of that farm and begun to have a vision of the possibility of becoming a genuinely Christian man in the world of commerce and industry. I desire to be implicitly believed when I state, that were it not for this vision, this possibility, I could never have brought myself to remain in the business world. But the foregleams of coming day had shone in upon me, and I determined to utilize every means compatible with an adoption and operation of the Golden Rule to demonstrate the fact that, in the twentieth century of the Christian era, the principles laid down by Jesus of Nazareth in the first, could be made to workwork successfully and not merely as a sacrificial ideal-for the mutual well-being of mankind, and to the glory of God.
At this point in my story, I want to turn aside from the main narrative, which relates to the development of The A. Nash Company under the principles of the Golden Rule, to deal with a poignant personal experience. I turn to it because nothing this book contains, exceeds it in importance so far as my own personal attitude toward life is concerned. It is the story of a great discovery- of the embracing of a great truth, which by God’s grace I mean never to relinquish while life shall last.
During the first three years of the World War-the years, that is, before the United States lined up to take her share in it-I found myself in a bitter, ironical frame of mind. Whenever I could get hold of a minister willing to listen to me, I would begin to rail at him regarding the frightful carnage going on in Europe.
“Look at that scene across the ocean,” I would say, “and tell me, if you think that is Christianity! Those nations who are at each other’s throats are, with one or two exceptions, all, nominally, Christian nations. Cannot the religion they profess, and which you preach and teach, do anything to put an end to this tragedy-the most awful thing the world has ever known-while almost the entire heathen world plays the parts of spectator? What’s wrong with Christianity that renders it powerless in this awful hour of world-wide need?”
Needless to say, none of them ever gave me an answer that amounted to anything. The men I put my question to were worried, perplexed, and simply didn’t know what reply to offer. And what is morealthough I, in my arrogance, assumed the role of questioner, I had no answer myself. Yet, as the facts already set down in this narrative indicate, I ought to have known just as well as anybody else. For had I not been a student of the Bible, and of the writings of its antagonists, virtually all my days?
Yet there I was, pestering anxious men with insistent queries for which I, myself, had no solution — a pretty contemptible form of diversion, as I see it now. But there was one minister in Cincinnati who appeared to be quite willing to face the situation, grave and bewildering as it was. Evening after evening, he would come and sit with me on my porch, and discuss the terrible war.
One day he surprised me by saying: “Mr. Nash, I have a boy about to be graduated from the university, and I have been asked to take some part in the exercises. Which means I shall be compelled to be away from my pulpit on a Sunday about two months hence. Will you take my place?”
“What on earth are you talking about?” I replied.
“I mean just exactly what I am saying,” he rejoined. “I want you to occupy my pulpit, and I will select your subject for you. Go over and tell my people what, in your opinion, is the matter with religion-with Christianity.”
“Well, if I do,” I answered sarcastically, “you can depend on one thing-you’ll have no congregation to meet you on your return.”
“I’ll risk that,” my friend returned. “Will you consent to do it?”
Possibly, because I did not care to run out of a challenge, more than for any other reason, I agreed to do what I had been asked.
Just as I began to prepare what in my pride of spirit I imagined would be a tremendous assault on the citadel of the Christian faith, I received word that my eldest boy, who had gone over to Europe with the Canadians, had been seriously wounded at Vimy Ridge, and was lying unconscious in a hospital in England. In addition, my youngest lad, caught up by the spirit of the time, had joined the United States Marines. The reading of that cablegram acted as a sort of solar plexus blow on my pride and self-sufficiency. I had accepted this challenge — well, to say the least of it -in no spirit of humility. And yet, here was I, heart-broken at the fate which had overtaken my boy, and thinking of hundreds of thousands of other gallant fellows who were pouring out their life-blood in France and Flanders. “This is no fitting time to get up in a church pulpit and shoot off a lot of nonsense,” I said to myself. “What is wrong with Christianity, anyhow? You had better find out for yourself, first, before you attempt to tell other people.”
So I started to find out. I went down to the library-any amount of articles were current at that time purporting to show that Christianity was an arrent failure-and began to ready up. And my reading soon brought me to see one great, stark, outstanding fact: That what all the writers, who were so eagerly rushing into print were attacking and finding fault with was not Christianity at all, but the lack of it! “Christianity had not failed, simply because Christianity had not yet been tried.”[1]
Quite a number of smart phrase-makers sought to annex credit for the invention of that phrase during the World War, each of whom had stolen it. Yet there was a tremendous proportion and element of truth in it, just as there had been away back in the early years of the eighteenth century, when the scoffing atheists of those worthless, godless days, flung it in the teeth of the professed followers of Jesus. In the individual life of many a saint of God it had been tried, and never once, when earnestly and sincerely tried, been found to fail.
But of adoption in any national, or, so far as the Christian Church was concerned, universal sense, there had been none. Which statement is as unchallengeably true at the very hour in which I am penning these lines, as in the days when the epigram was regarded as being quite the proper thing to lisp and snicker, by the “wits” and the witless of the London coffee-houses and Paris salons, as they snapped their snuff-boxes, and strutted their way down to a well-deserved and unlifting oblivion. To be sure, the voice of the Prophet of Nazareth is heard, today, above the babble and clamor of men and markets, with more distinctness than in any previous era of the Christian centuries. Yet, substantially, the shameful indictment still stands, and to it the Church, together with the world, must enter a plea of “Guilty!”
But to get back to my own case: As a man reared an Adventist, I imagined I knew something about the Scriptures; so I went back to the old Book and began to acquaint myself afresh with the teachings of the Galilean. Very soon I realized that I was reading in a fashion I had never read before. In other days I read to prove a theory, searching for proof-texts to bolster up a creed. This time I was striving earnestly to find out, from the authentic records extant, what it really was that Jesus sought to establish, what to teach, what, if anything to condemn.
There were quite a few surprises in store for me. Among other things, I discovered my hitherto preconceived notion that Jesus uttered words of sharp censure and bold condemnation concerning the religion of His race, to be utterly unfounded. What He did condemn, what did call forth His scathing denunciation, was the atmosphere of formality which permeated the nation’s worship of Jehovah, and the note of insincerity which made discord of what should have been a note of praise. Time and again, I saw how He was continually pointing out the claims of the law and the precepts of the prophets, and how appallingly those about Him were violating the one, and turning a deaf ear to the other. “I have not come to destroy your religion,” He said in effect, “but to teach you how to fulfill its requirements, and to conform to its demands.” That was the substance of Christ’s message to the people of His own day.
And then, just as naturally as the action of sunlight, I began to ponder the question as to what was to become of all those brave lads who were daily laying down their lives on the reddened battlefields of Europe? I turned to see what Jesus had to say about a question like that, and found that He had very little to say. I found that His chief concern was the establishment of the principles of the Kingdom of God on earth. Yet I came upon this one great solacing word — a word He gave to those who were striving to follow Him when Calvary was already flinging its crimson shadows about Him, when He Who had done no wrong was about to endure the poignant agonies of the Cross: “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.” That was Jesus’ message, and the more I read of His teaching, the longer I searched His sayings, the more surely I became convinced that it represented, practically, all the revelation He ever gave concerning the life that stretches away beyond the one that is bounded by earth and Time.
As these things became clearer to me, I began to see how little there really is that Jesus said which applies only to the “life which is to come.” But I discovered how much He had to say about “the life that now is.” To be sure, many of His sayings are capable of a two-fold application, but most of them relate to life as it should be lived right here. I saw, as I had never done before, that the Son of God came into this world, not merely that He might transport a few of us to another and more felicitous place, but that men might find salvation here and now. In its ultimate summation, the philosophy of Jesus found expression in His unceasing effort for the establishment of a social and spiritual order here in this world, which He called the Kingdom of God; that if men are ever to become part of it, and live in harmony with it, that now is the accepted time; and now the day of salvation; that men are to seek after God now, amid all the tumult and turmoil of everyday life.
And so I read on and on: “After this manner, therefore, pray ye … Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.” “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things [temporal blessings of every sort] shall be added unto you.” “The kingdom of God cometh not by observation: Neither shall they say, ‘Lo, here!’ or ‘lo, there,’ for behold the kingdom of God is within [among] you.” And as a climax to His teaching in which He pictured the great kingdom, He enjoined men to pray for it, to work for its establishment in the earth, and “therefore — because it is what I stand for; because of the beatitudes I proclaim; because it is imperative for the welfare of mankind — therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.”
As I read that twelfth verse of the seventh chapter of Matthew, the light of its true meaning broke in upon my soul for the first time in my life. I laid down my Bible and said, “The only thing that is wrong with Christianity is that we are not giving it a trial. We are using it as something to talk about, Sunday after Sunday, as something to sing and to pray about, to listen to ministers preach about, and all the time neglecting to go forth and live it in our daily lives. If nations, communities, individuals, were only living by the great principle which, glibly enough, has come to be called the Golden Rule, what a different world this earth would be! Then, indeed, would the glorious consummation be realizedHeaven would veritably come to earth, and the Father’s will be done among men, even as it is done in Heaven.”
Well, that is what I discovered during the hardest weeks of study I ever put in in my life. I went and occupied my friend’s pulpit, as I had promised to do. But the address I made, bore no resemblance to the one it was in my mind and intention to deliver when I consented to do so. It was a very different kind of thing —of that everybody may rest assured. It contained but one plea-a plea for the establishment of the Kingdom of God in the hearts of men. With that accomplished, the work of their hands would take care of itself, resolving itself, simply and naturally, into an outward expression of the indwelling spirit of the blameless Christ, Whose work and mission was to uplift and save mankind.
“There was much talk [in the synagogue] about Jesus’ preaching doctrines which were upsetting for the common people; his enemies maintained that his teachings were impractical, that everything would go to pieces if everybody made an honest effort to live in accordance with his ideas. And the men of many subsequent generations have said the same things. Many intelligent and well-meaning men, even in the more enlightened age of these revelations, maintain that modern civilization could not have been built upon the teachings of Jesus_—and they are partially right. But all such doubters forget that a much better civilization could have been built upon his teachings, and sometime will be. This world has never seriously tried to carry out the teachings of Jesus on a large scale, notwithstanding that halfhearted attempts have often been made to follow the doctrines of so-called Christianity.” [UB 154:4.6]
“This world has never seriously or sincerely or honestly tried out these dynamic ideas and divine ideals of Jesus’ doctrine of the kingdom of heaven.” [UB 170:4.14]
"Present-day profit-motivated economics is doomed unless profit motives can be augmented by service motives. Ruthless competition based on narrowminded self-interest is ultimately destructive of even those things which it seeks to maintain. Exclusive and self-serving profit motivation is incompatible with Christian ideals-much more incompatible with the teachings of Jesus.
"In economics, profit motivation is to service motivation what fear is to love in religion. But the profit motive must not be suddenly destroyed or removed; it keeps many otherwise slothful mortals hard at work. It is not necessary, however, that this social energy arouser be forever selfish in its objectives.
“The profit motive of economic activities is altogether base and wholly unworthy of an advanced order of society; nevertheless, it is an indispensable factor throughout the earlier phases of civilization. Profit motivation must not be taken away from men until they have firmly possessed themselves of superior types of nonprofit motives for economic striving and social serving-the transcendent urges of superlative wisdom, intriguing brotherhood, and excellency of spiritual attainment.” [UB 71:6.1-3] ↩︎