What is it to be righteous, or to be right?

It is to do all things in accordance with Truth. To be righteous is to think according to Truth. Righteous doing is but the outcome of righteous thinking. Webster says to be righteous is to yield to all their due; to be just, holy, virtuous.

 Can you not see now how all one's heart, all one's soul, and all one's strength really must be given to the Good if we ever wish to be righteous? It is only to the righteous that great blessings are promised.

Experience has taught me that if I say, " I am not prejudiced," that my thoughts are apt to be self-centered; but that if I say, " There is no such thing as prejudice," I am not only denying for myself, but for every one else. If there is no such thing as prejudice, then no one can be prejudiced. The one who condemns is not seeing righteously; for there is no condemnation to him who has the same mind as Christ Jesus.
HEILBRDUN; OR, DROPS FROM THE FOUNTAIN OF HEALTH. BY FANNY M. HARLEY 1898

"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 arrant failure and began to read 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." 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 unchallengably 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 clamour 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!"

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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 realized Heaven would veritably come to earth, and the Father's will be done among men, even as it is done in Heaven."
Arthur “Golden Rule” Nash-The golden rule in business[1923]