UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES
 
 ourth Edition, is. Net. Cloth, 28. Net. 
 
 THE 
 
 GOSPEL 
 
 OF 
 
 THE 
 POOR 
 
 BY 
 
 nORRISON 
 DAVIDSON. 
 
 THE 
 
 CHRIST 
 
 OF 
 
 THE 
 
 COMMUNE. 
 
 418 8 
 
 London: FRANCIS RIDDELL HENDER5QN.
 
 Fifth Edition. Is. net. Cloth, 2s. net. 
 
 THE 
 
 Savagedom, 
 
 Slavedom, 
 
 . . Serfdom, 
 
 AND THE NEW. ^a^edo™. 
 
 OLD ORDER 
 
 Freedom. 
 
 By MORRISON DAVIDSON. 
 
 Writing to Mr. Morrison Davidson, under date Aug. 
 23rd, 1894, Count Leo Tolstoy says : — 
 
 Dear Sir, — I got your two books, and thank you 
 heartily for them. It is the greatest joy of my life to know 
 persons such as you, and to see that the ideas which I live 
 for are likewise the mainspring of life unto others, and are 
 expressed in such beautiful and vigorous style as I had 
 occasion to notice in your two books. 
 
 Both your books are remarkably good, and I cannot 
 give the preference to either of them. In "The Old Order 
 and the New" the Christian truth serves to corroborate 
 the truth of the Socialistic tendencies; whereas in "The 
 Gospel of the Poor " it is the Socialistic, Communistic, and 
 Anarchistic theories that serve to corroborate the Christian 
 truth, which occupies the most prominent part. 
 
 Though, while there is a censorship in Russia, the pub- 
 lishing of these books is out of the question, yet I shall get 
 some of my friends to translate them, and will then spread 
 them. 
 
 The enemies of the Kingdom of God have but one means 
 left them : it is to hush up the truth and make believe they 
 neither hear nor comprehend it — the fact of which was so 
 strikingly acknowledged by the French when they pro- 
 hibited to publish the processes (pleadings) of the Anarchists. 
 
 It follows then the chief struggle which lies before a 
 labourer of the Kingdom of God is to frustrate this plot of 
 non-believing and non-hearing of what is seen and heard 
 of all. 
 
 I therefore wish you, as a strong and active labourer, 
 the greatest amount of spiritual energy and entire success 
 in it Yours truly, 
 
 LEO TOLSTOY. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 FRANCIS RIDDELL HENDERSON, 
 
 26, Paternoster Square, E.G.
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR.
 
 LIST OF WORKS BY 
 
 MORRISON DAVIDSON. 
 
 Annals of Toil; Being Labour History Outlines, 
 Roman and British, Parts i, 2, 3 & 4, paper, 
 each Is. net. In one volume, cloth, 5s. net. 
 
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 Let There Be Light! New Politics for the People, 
 Is. net. Cloth, 2s. net. 
 
 The Old Order and the New, from Individualism 
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 Politics for the People, First Series, is. net. 
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 Anarchist Socialism v. State Socialisni, 
 
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 London : 
 
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 THE 
 
 GOSPEL 
 OF 
 
 THE 
 
 BY 
 
 nORRISON 
 DAVID50N. 
 
 THE 
 
 CHRIST 
 
 OF 
 
 THE 
 
 COMMUNE. 
 
 FOURTH EDITION. 
 
 {Printed from Stereo). 
 
 LONDON : FRANCIS RIDDELL HENDERSON, 
 26, Paternoster Square.
 
 To 
 
 My old Friend and revered Pastor, 
 ROBERT BLAKELY DRUMMOND, B.A., 
 
 Minister of St. Mark's Unitarian Church, 
 
 Edinburgh, 
 
 " An Israelite indeed in whom is no guile" 
 
 In slender token of sincere respect, 
 
 this liitle volume is dedicated 
 
 BY 
 
 J.M.D.
 
 FOREWORDS 
 TO THE FOURTH EDITION. 
 
 
 Since this booklet was originally penned, some ten years 
 ago, the Higher Criticism has largely busied itself with 
 the four accepted Gospels or Biographies of the Master. 
 With what result ? Even The British Weekly, chief oracle 
 of Orthodox Nonconformity, is constrained reluctantly to 
 admit "the uncertainty that seems to hang round the whole 
 story of His life": 
 
 " Who wrote the Gospels? It is not certain. 
 
 ' ' When were they ivritten ? It is not certain. 
 
 *' How close do they bring us in point of time to the events 
 which they purport to record? It is not possible to give a 
 precise answer. 
 
 " How far do they represent the mind of Christ as it was in 
 itself, giving us the very words that He spoke, and how far the 
 mind of Christ as it had come to be in the mind of His 
 disciples, inflected, modified, adapted by and to new circum- 
 stances and experiences — interpreted by His Spirit perhaps, hut 
 really interpreted — and therefore not iti the strict and literal 
 sense historical? Once more it is impossible to draw a clear 
 line. 
 
 " There are hundreds of such problems ". 
 
 But, whatever may come to be settled expert opinion 
 regarding the letter of the Gospel narratives — and it 
 promises to be considerably more destructive than I had 
 anticipated — the positions taken up in The Gospel of the 
 Poor, I find on reperusal, are not appreciably affected 
 thereby. For said not St. Augustine, and said truly ? — 
 
 That which is called the Christian Religion existed among 
 the Ancients and never did not exist from the planting of the 
 Human Race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the 
 true Religion, which already subsisted, began to be called 
 Christianity. 
 
 What the Christ really did was to focus in His own soul 
 all the broken lights of Spiritual Truth in His day — lights 
 ineffectively scattered abroad, for unnumbered preceding 
 
 cW'
 
 FOREWORDS. 
 
 centuries, among all the leading Nations of the Earth. Of 
 these truths He made "current coin" by the spotless and 
 unique example of His own life and death. 
 
 Christ's Religion, therefore, is not a Religion but the 
 Religion, because His Gospel corresponds to the inborn 
 capacity of man as revealed in the History of the Race. 
 He is not a Master among Masters but the Master, "God 
 giveth not the Spirit by measure unto Him." Says 
 Professor Harnack with rare penetration : 
 
 What the first disciples received fram Him goes far beyond 
 the particular words and the preaching they heard from Him, 
 and their mode of apprehending Him, exceeds His own self- 
 witness. It could not be otherwise : these disciples were con- 
 scious that they possessed in Christ not only a Teacher .... 
 they knew themselves as redeemed, new men redeemed through 
 Him. 
 
 In other words the Religion of Christ is self-illuminating 
 and, in the last arbitrament, it is as independent of written 
 records as of hierophants of the altar. It can very well 
 survive the complete elimination of the supernatural by 
 Criticism, Higher or Lower. " Be ye perfect even as your 
 Father in Heaven is perfect." " He that believeth in Me, 
 the works that I do shall he do also ; and greater [more 
 supernormal, not supernatural] works than these shall he 
 do." "To as many as received Him gave He power to 
 become Sons of God." In the Contemporary for June (1902), 
 a writer (D. Joye) on " The Reformed Church in France " 
 observes, and his Faith is mine : 
 
 Hoiv has He (Christ) declared Him (God)? He has 
 declared Him as ' Truth ' and ' Love.' For all men God is 
 undoubtedly Personal Being whose actions — almost entirely 
 unknown — can only be epitomised in that double attribute, 
 * Truth and Love.' When a man's intelligence, in all its 
 natural Reason and Will, fixes its desire exclusively on Truth 
 and Love, I cannot free myself from the idea that God would 
 commtinicate to such an Intelligence that Positive Revelation 
 which Orthodoxy will only recognize as supernatural. The 
 7(>ords of the author of the Proverbs ought to come home with 
 all their force : 
 * They THAT Seek the Lord understand all things !'
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Pass 
 
 No, I. 
 Woe unto you that are rich i 
 
 No. II. 
 Is Christianity Played out ? 7 
 
 No. III. 
 Proputty, Proputty, Proputty I3 
 
 No. IV. 
 Strikes, b.c. 150-70 18 
 
 No. V. 
 The Law and the Prophets 24 
 
 No. VI. 
 The Law and the Prophets 30 
 
 No. VII. 
 The Law and the Prophets ....>. 36 
 
 No. vin. 
 
 The Law and the Prophets 41 
 
 No. IX. 
 The Usurer — Ecrase* L'Infame 47 
 
 No. X. 
 Usurer as Insurer 53 
 
 No. XI. 
 The Law and the Prophets 58 
 
 No. XII. 
 The Law and the Prophets ...... 6 
 
 No. XIII. 
 Give us a King .....*... 71
 
 vlii CONTENTS. 
 
 No. XIV. 
 The Prophets . • • 6 
 
 No. XV. 
 The Messianic Expectation 8i 
 
 No. XVJ. 
 After the Captivity 86 
 
 No. XVII. 
 The Jewish Sects 9^ 
 
 No. XV7II. 
 The Nazarene 9^ 
 
 No. XIX. 
 The Temptation loi 
 
 No. XX. 
 The Religion of Christ io6 
 
 No. XXI. 
 Conception of the Kingdom of God . • . .no 
 
 No. XXII. 
 The " Kingdom of God " and the " World " , . . n6 
 
 No. XXIII. 
 The Lord's Prayer « • 122 
 
 No. XXIV. 
 Christ and Woman 128 
 
 No. XXV. 
 Christ and Labour . 134 
 
 No. XXVJ. 
 Christ and the State ..... c • 140 
 
 No. XXVII. 
 
 Summation ... 145 
 
 Appendix I , . , . . 151 
 
 Appendix II. ,,.,...,. 13
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 WOE UNTO YOU THAT ARE RICH I 
 
 And there was delivered unto Him the book of the Prophet Esaias. 
 And when He had opened the book, He found the place where it was 
 written, 
 
 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath anointed me 
 to preach the Gospel to the Poor ; He hath sent me to heal the 
 broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recover- 
 ing of sight to the blind ; to set at liberty them that are bruised. 
 
 To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. 
 
 And He closed the book, and gave it again to the minister, and sat 
 down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were 
 fastened on Him. — Luke iv., 17-20. 
 
 Then said He unto them, A certain man made a great supper, and 
 bade many. 
 
 And sent his servant at suppertime to say to them who were bid- 
 den, Come ; for all things are now ready. 
 
 And they all with one consent began to make excuse. The first 
 said unto him, I have bought a piece of ground, and I must needs 
 go and see it. I pray thee have me excused. 
 
 And another said, I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to 
 prove them. 
 
 And another said, I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot 
 come. 
 
 So the servant came, and shewed his lord these things. Then 
 the master of the house being angry said to the servant, Go out 
 >iuickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither 
 the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind. 
 
 And the servant said, " Lord, it is done as thou hast commanded, 
 and yet there is room." 
 
 And the lord said unto the servants. Go out into the highways and 
 hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled, 
 
 For I say unto you, that none cf these men that were bidden shall 
 taste of my supper. — Luke xiv., 16-24. 
 
 And the common people heard llim gladly. — Mark xii., 37. 
 
 (0 B
 
 a THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR, 
 
 In looking around the so-called " civilized " world of 
 to-day we find that the poor have been wantonly robbed 
 by the rich ot every blessing of which force and fraud 
 could possibly deprive them. Wherever we turn out 
 weary eyes the fell institution of " private property" 
 confronts us; rapacious, cruel, vindictive, all-powerful 
 in Church and State. " And I beheld the tears of such 
 as were oppressed, and they had no comforter, and on 
 the side of their oppressors there was power." And, 
 alas ! so it is. On every hand the rich man's " law-and- 
 order" is graven with an iron pen, or traced in letters 
 of blood. The poor know nothing of "law" but its 
 penalties and exactions. 
 
 The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law, 
 The world affords no law to make thee rich. 
 
 Most true ; but one thing " the world " might surely 
 have left the disinherited of the earth ; viz., the Gospel 
 of the Poor ; Christ's Glad Tidings of a Commonwealth, 
 in which private property shall be unknown, and the 
 server and not the served shall be the greatest of all. 
 But no. The rich have known how to ** exploit " the 
 sublime Communist of Nazareth and his priceless 
 message to mankind as they have exploited all besides. 
 Not merely have they made the Blessed Gospel of none 
 effect by their churchianities, they have actually con- 
 verted that which was to be *' without money and with- 
 out price" into a mine of untold ** profit," worked for 
 their own private advantage by competing companies 
 of cunning ecclesiastics "of all denominations," sophists, 
 hypocrites and trained liars whom no true Christian 
 man can regard for a moment without feelings of loath- 
 ing and abhorrence. In their hands, the Gospel of the 
 Poor has become the Gospel of Mammon. Christianity 
 is no longer recognisable. The Ministry is at best but 
 one of the '* genteel professions " into which " respect- 
 ability " elbows its way to the exclusion of the outcasts 
 of society for whom the " supper" was laid. 
 
 " Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the Kingdom of 
 Heaven. Woe unto you that are rich, for ye have 
 received your consolation." Such I take to be the very
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 3 
 
 ssence of the " Faith once delivered to the Saints," but 
 ow distorted almost past recognition by unfaithful 
 ite vards of the Word. "Who, then, is the faithful 
 nci wise Steward whom his lord shall set over his 
 ousehold to give them their portion of food in due 
 sason ? Blessed is that servant whom his lord, when 
 e Cometh, shall find so doing." 
 
 \h, yes, "Who then is the faithful and wise steward ? " 
 
 •Iwt he of Canterbury, assuredly ; nor he of York ; nor 
 
 e of London. Tliese rich priests have already received, 
 
 r are now receiv^ing their *' consolation " in palaces, 
 
 and stipends of ;^io,ooo and ;^i5,ooo a year, and have 
 
 neither part nor lot in the Kingdom of God and His 
 
 Righteousness which the poor are to inherit, not in 
 
 mtbibus, as these jugglers pretend, but on this solid 
 
 earth, here and now. 
 
 But we must not confine the "woe" to the arch 
 Antichrists of the National Zion. The riotous mob of 
 greedy Nonconformist stewards whom Keir Hardie on a 
 late memorable occasion encountered at Bradford, are, 
 if possible, even more odious and unfaithful. They do 
 not preach the Gospel according to Christ and His 
 Apostles, they preach the Gospel according to the 
 "front pews," and are to all intents the unblushing 
 Ministers of Mammon. There is not a prominent man 
 among them, so far as my observation has gone, who 
 has in any way realised the true significance of Christ's 
 life and teaching. Nay, one of their number, a " Lib- 
 erationist " polemic of note, Rogers by name, told us 
 apropos of the Keir Hardie incident, that " Christ 
 was the friend of the rich," and presumably of his own, 
 as his "gospel-shop" is understood to be a good- 
 going concern, where the sheep are shorn to some 
 purpose. 
 
 One can only marvel at the hardihood of such an 
 assertion. If I understand Christianity aright it amounts 
 merely to what old Homer would have called " dog- 
 faced impudence." 
 
 Christ was indeed the "friend of the rich," but on one 
 condition : that they sold all they had and gave to the poor.
 
 4 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 "Woe unto you that are rich!" "Thou thoroughly 
 respectable young man that hast great possessions, too 
 much for one man's share, sell and distribute among 
 those who have less than their share, and join the 
 Communistic Fraternity or Church which I have 
 founded — the nucleus of the Kingdom of God upon 
 earth." 
 
 We know the fate of that unhappy young man, and 
 of nearly all others with " large possessions." He 
 " went away sorrowful," but got over it, took to Lease- 
 hold Enfranchisement, then joined the Personal Liberty 
 and Property Defence League at Jerusalem, became a 
 Vice-President, and peradventure a somewhat blatant 
 " Liberationist." Certain sure he never entered the 
 Kingdom of Heaven. He could no more pass the 
 portal than could a camel go through a needle's 
 eye. 
 
 In vain do the unfaithful stewards " of all denomina- 
 tions " try to salve their own consciences, and those of 
 their rich huckster sectaries, with the fiction that Dives 
 was " tormented," not because he was rich, but because 
 he was uncharitable to Lazarus, and derelict in alms- 
 giving. But no amount of apologetic wriggling is of 
 the smallest avail. Had Christ intended to inculcate 
 the mere duty of almsgiving he would not have brought 
 a millionaire on the scene — a Westminster, a Colonel 
 North, or a Vanderbilt. He would have been content 
 with the case of a man just comfortably off as far more 
 likely to bring conviction home to the general body of 
 the well-to-do. 
 
 Besides, there was nothing particularly hard-hearted 
 or actively inhuman about Dives. He did not send his 
 hounds to chase poor Lazurus away from his gate, as 
 most " gentlemen of England," in the circumstances 
 would have done. He did not grudge the woe-begone 
 creature the crumbs that fell from his table, and from 
 such a sumptuous table the crumbs must have been 
 pretty palatable. Our unemployed, who know what 
 coarse fare and no fare mean, would doubtless have 
 appreciated them.
 
 THE GOSPEL OP THE POOR. 5 
 
 No, it was not for his niggardliness that Dives was 
 condemned. It was simply because he was rich ; 
 because he had a large income which he had done 
 nothing to create, and because he lived up to it, re- 
 gardless of the fact that he was surrounded by suffering 
 fellow beings who had little or no income at all. 
 
 In a word, Christ discerned clearly that the rich man, 
 with his purple and fine linen, and his sumptuous feasts, 
 was, despite his easy-going disposition, a robber. In 
 the ** Kingdom," which has, alas ! not " come " even yet, 
 there is no place for such. A "great gulf" must for- 
 ever separate the kingdom (rule) of the Individualist from 
 that of the Collectivist. 
 
 In Christ's day even the elements of economic truth, 
 were hidden from the wise and prudent. Hence the 
 extreme difficulty His very disciples had in compre- 
 hending the drift of His Gospel of the Poor. But in 
 recent years, much that was dark in His wonderful say- 
 ings has become resplendently luminous in the re- 
 searches and writings of such men as St. Simon, 
 Proudhon, Rodbertus, Marx and many more devoted 
 servants of Humanity. We know now the grounds of 
 Dives 'condemnation, which Christ left unexplained, as 
 He did much besides, because the ignorant generation 
 He addressed " could not bear them." " Howbeit," He 
 added, "when He, the Spirit of Truth, is come. He 
 will guide you unto all truth," and, in spite of the 
 " clergy of all denominations," the Spirit of Truth 
 is abroad to-day, as. He, perhaps, has never been 
 before. 
 
 We are just beginning to understand Christianity ; 
 to learn that its Divine Founder was very much of a 
 Secularist and nothing of a Sacerdotalist ; that He 
 concerned Himself witli the life here, and sparingly with 
 the life hereafter ; that His followers were to be as 
 exempt from vent as the birds of the air, or the lilies of 
 the field ; that principal as well as interest was to cease, 
 and that the profit which constitutes another's loss 
 cannot be tolerated in a Christian Community. 
 ••Think not," said the Great Teacher, •' that I am come
 
 6 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 to destroy the Law and the Prophets ; I am not come 
 destroy, but to fulfil." In the " Gospel of the Poo: 
 my aim will be fulfilled, and fulfilled abundantly, il 
 can but assign some sufficient reasons for the be] 
 that Christ was, indeed, what he claimed to be, the lo 
 promised Messiah, the Saviour of the Race, ♦• the W 
 the Truth, and the Lite."
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 No. II. 
 
 •'IS CHRISTIANITY PLAYED OUT?*» 
 
 Worn and footsore was the Prophet 
 When he gained the holy hill ; 
 
 •' God has left the earth," he murmured, 
 •• Here His presence lingers still " 
 
 •' God of all the olden prophets. 
 Wilt Thou speak with men no more ? 
 
 Have I not as truly served Thee, 
 As thy chosen ones of yore ? 
 
 •• Hear me, guider of my fathers, 
 
 Lo ! a humble heart is mine ; 
 By Thy mercy I beseech Thee. 
 
 Grant Thy servant but a sign ! " 
 
 Bowing then his head, he listened 
 
 For an answer to his prayer : 
 No loud burst of thunder followed, 
 
 Not a murmur stirred the air. 
 
 But the tuft of moss before him 
 
 Opened while he waited yet ; 
 And, from out the rock's hard bosom 
 
 Sprang a tender violet. 
 
 " God, I thank Thee ! " said the Prophet.* 
 " Hard of heart and blind was I ; 
 
 Looking to the holy mountain 
 For the gift of prophecy. 
 
 " Still Thou speakest with Thy children 
 
 Freely as in old sublime 
 Humbleness, and love, and patience, 
 
 Still give empire over time. 
 
 •• Had I trusted in my nature, 
 And had faith in lowly things,
 
 8 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 Thou Thyself wouldst then have sought me, 
 And set free my spirit's wings. 
 
 " But I looked for signs and wonders 
 That o'er men would give me sway ; 
 
 Thirsting to be more than mortal, 
 I was even less than clay. 
 
 •• Ere I entered on my journey, 
 
 As I girt my loins to start. 
 Ran to me my little daughter, 
 
 The beloved of my heart. 
 
 " In her hand she held a flower, 
 
 Like to this as like may be. 
 Which, beside my very threshold, 
 
 She had plucked and brought to me." 
 
 Lowell. 
 
 In the Daily Chvomcle andsundry other journals aeon 
 troversy was lately carried on without a parallel in th 
 annals of journalism. •' Is Christianity Played Out ?/ 
 was the question, and so great was the public interes t 
 aroused in the problem that the unhappy editors wer e 
 soon at their wit's end to know what to do with the vast 
 volume of correspondence with which they were deluged. 
 On the very eve of the assembling of Parliament, politics 
 and politicians seemed suddenly to have ceased to con- 
 cern the great majority of readers. Even the G.O.M. 
 and Home Rule were at a discount. 
 
 A considerable, if not exactly a great, poet and 
 dramatist, Mr. Robert Buchanan, had been pleased, m 
 his *' Wandering Jew," to summon Jesus of Nazareth 
 before his august judgment-seat, and to convict him as 
 an unmiti.G^ated " failure," " the very Genius of Failure." 
 • Spiritually," he admitted that Jesus was perfect, or 
 •almost" so; but "intellectually" He was naught. 
 He had no " orb of rational polity," and so lost him- 
 self in mere " nebulosity " of sentiment. Could not so 
 much as " save a single soul ! " The world is full of 
 misery, and Christ, with the best intentions, has been 
 powerless to relieve it. He might have written a 
 Manual of Political Economy, and with the aid of 
 algebraic symbols, eliminated the unknown quantity of
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR, Q 
 
 human bliss, but His feeble intellect was unequal to 
 the task, and so He must be dismissed for ever to the 
 limbo of heroic •' failures" with the distinction of being 
 the very Genius of the whole tribe. " His message 
 was spoken in vain." 
 
 Well, I think it must be admitted, even by those who 
 are most jealous for the honour of Him who came to 
 seek and to save that which was lost, that there is a 
 certain apparent truth in this indictment. Nowhere 
 does the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, which He pro- 
 claimed to be at hand, exist. 
 
 But is the "failure" His or ours? Had He no 
 " orb of rational polity " to offer for our acceptance ? 
 I say He had, and did, and if we had but adhered to 
 that " orb," ihe sin, sorrow, and suffering which all 
 good men deplore would long ere now have been 
 banished from the earth. But man is a free agent, and 
 he has elected to reject Christ and His "polity," and 
 the consequences are upon us to day. 
 
 Now we come to the core of the whole momentous 
 business. What was Christ's " polity " ? The answer 
 is, however startling it may appear to some : Anar- 
 chist Communism. This I challenge any student of early 
 Christianity to gainsay. Indeed, the Actsoj the Apostles 
 is conclusive on that point. The primitive Churches 
 were fraternities having all things in common. Christ sub- 
 stituted Collectivism for Individualism, and no Church 
 that does not do the same has the least title to call 
 itself Christian. The very test of a man's fitness for 
 entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, was 
 his willingness to sell all he had and give it to the poor 
 and enrol himself in a Communistic Brotherhood, 
 where the distinction between mine and thine was at an 
 end. 
 
 What has the Old Man at the Vatican got to say to 
 this ? What Our own Benson Cantuarius, the Successor 
 of St. Augustine ? What our prosperous Dissenting 
 Dr. Parker, of the City Temple ? I did not observe 
 that any of the Price Hugheses, whose Sunday vapour- 
 ings on the subject were reported at such length in the
 
 10 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 papers, cared to face up to this, the real crux of tl 
 controversy. The fatal elimination of Comnuinis 
 from Christian precept and practice by the vi 
 Imperial homicide Constantine and his pagan crew, ' 
 the beginning of the fourth century, banished Christ, 
 Kingdom from the earth and relegated it to the cloud 
 where, alas, it has most unprofitably remained ev: 
 since. Assuredly no curse so great as that of othe- 
 worldlincss has ever befallen mankind. 
 
 But Christ was in no way responsible for this bliirh- 
 ing influence, though Mr. Buchanan says He wa 
 •• He turned," so our poet tells us, " from this wor! 
 as from something in its very nature base and detest 
 able." That is, doubtless, up-to-date Christianity, bu 
 it was not the opinion, as we know, of some of Christ's 
 own contemporaries, who thought that He did not 
 detest the world half enough. They accused Him of 
 being a glutton and a tippler, with a taste for low 
 company, and to this day, I understand, the United 
 Kingdom Alliance bears Him a grudge for turning the 
 water into wine — His first miracle, by the way — at the 
 marriage feast at Cana of Galilee. 
 
 It is true He did detest the vile, hypocritical world 
 of Dives, the Scribe, and the Pharisee, and denounced 
 it in no measured terms ; but He never once rebuked 
 the vices of the poor, or charged them with base 
 thriftlessness, or any other economic delinquency 
 commonly brought 'against them. On the contrary, He 
 pronounced them " blessed," and gave the harlots and 
 the /jiW/c^Mt precedence over the respectable "classes" 
 in entering the Kingdom. Did He turn even from the 
 robber by His side on the cross, when He uttered the 
 ever- memorable assurance — This night shalt thou be with 
 Mc in Paradise ? 
 
 No; there is no vulnerable joint in the spiritual or 
 the intellectual armour of Christ ; but to pluck selfishness 
 out of the heart of man, and by so doing to regenerate 
 human society in its economic and moral entirety, 
 was a tremendous undertaking, whose fulfilment was 
 necessarily a work of time.
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. II 
 
 Queen Victoria does not care to be told that there 
 are to be no "princes or great ones exercising authority" 
 n the Kingdom where the greatest is to be the servan( 
 of all. He of the Seven Hills and he of Canterbury 
 naturally recoil from the Master who told the much- 
 married woman at the well of Samaria that the day 
 was coming when neither on Mount Gerizim, nor yet at 
 Jerusalem, Rome or Canterbury were true worshippers 
 to be found, but wherever and whenever God, who is a 
 Spirit, is approached by man in spirit and in truth. A 
 Westminster or a Portland does not take kindly to a 
 gospel which teaches that all men have the same right 
 to the soil and its products as the birds of the air and 
 the grass of the fields. Rothscliild has naturally a poor 
 opinion of Him who said : " Lend, hoping for nothing 
 again." Carnegie does not much like the parable of the 
 labourers in the vineyard, who each — short-timer and 
 long-timer alike — received his " penny." My Lords 
 Wolseley and Alcester naturally enough turn a deaf ear 
 to the injunction: " Put up thy sword. He that taketh 
 the sword shall perish by the sword." 
 
 The truth is, Christ and His real disciples are at 
 mortal strife with every authority and institution of 
 which the so-called "civilised " world of to-day boasts 
 itself. They abominate its " Sovereigns and States- 
 men " ; its Lords and Commons ; its priests and 
 parsons; its judges and policemen; its jailers and 
 hangmen ; its armies and navies ; its rates and taxes ; 
 its prisons and work-houses ; its usury banks ; its 
 stock exchanges ; its insurance offices and Liberator 
 Societies — in a word, the whole monstrous paraphernalia 
 by which the institution of private property is in- 
 iquitously upheld, to the destruction of the poor and 
 the debasement of the rich. 
 
 Some of the preachers, I observe, endeavoured to 
 show that the Divine Communist of Nazareth, whom 
 they dare to call Master, was a respectable law-abiding 
 citizen who punctually paid His taxes to Caesar. So 
 indeed He did, though not without protest. But there 
 again His profound philosophy of life manifested itself.
 
 12 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 He came to destroy the empire of the Caesars, but from 
 within, not from without. Evil was not to be over- 
 come by evil, but by good. If a man, Caesar or another, 
 wrongfully compels you to go a mile, go twain. If he 
 demands your coat, add your vest also. 
 
 Well, these precepts of the Kingdom are indeed hard 
 to obey, but that they are profoundly true all the 
 Buchanans, and all the •' Wandering Jews " in the 
 world will never be able to disprove. They have not yet 
 triumphed ; but the world is still only in its moral and 
 intellectual infancy. The odds against them have been 
 and are enormous, but in the fulness of time, the words 
 commonly ascribed to Julian the Apostate will assuredly 
 be literally verified : Thou luist conquered, Pale Galilean!
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 13 
 
 No. III. 
 
 ••PROPUTTY. PROPUTTY, PROPUTTY." 
 
 Private property is not an institution of God. God did not give 
 the earth, its vegetables, its fruits, its mineral wealth, its cattle, 
 the riches of river, sea and ocean into the hands of the few to the 
 degradation of the many ; and yet almost ninety per cent, of all the 
 so-called sins and crimes of society may be traced, either directly 
 or indirectly, to private property. 
 
 Sins against God, forsooth I They are nothing of the kind, but 
 sins against present social arrangements. Theft, fraud, embezzle- 
 ment, forgery, gambling, poaching, and a multitude of other crimes 
 are the terrible progeny of private property. — Rev. J. Macdonald. 
 
 " How delighted we should all be to throw open our doors to 
 Him (Christ) and listen to His divine precepts Don't you think 
 so, Mr. Carlyle ? " asked a fine Society lady. Carlyle answered : 
 "No madam, I don't. I think if He had come very fashionably 
 dressed, with plenty of money, and preaching doctrines palatable 
 to the higher orders, I might have had the honour of receiving from 
 you a card of invitation, on the back of which would be written, 
 •To meet our Saviour.' But if He came uttering His sublime pre- 
 cepts, and denouncing tlie Pharisees, and associating with the 
 publicans and lower orders, as He did, you would have treated Him 
 as the Jews did, and cried out, ' Take Him to Newgate and hang 
 Him.' True, Lord Houghton might have invited Him to breakfast." 
 
 Christianity has been tried for more than eighteen hundred years ; 
 perhaps it is time to try the religion of Jesus. — Dean Milman. 
 
 Broadly speaking, the elements of our boasted "civili- 
 zation " come to us from ancient Greece, Rome and 
 Judea. To the Greeks we owe our philosophy, science 
 and art ; to the Romans our jurisprudence ("law and 
 order ") ; and to the Jews our religion and morals. 
 
 The prime object of Christ's Mission was to uproot from 
 the earth the fatal poison-tree of private property, and
 
 14 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR, 
 
 to replace it by the healing plant of common possession 
 That the latter has been of painfully slow growth, thi 
 most cursory glance at the rampant Individualism o 
 nearly all our existing institutions will satisfy the mos 
 sceptical. But before we pronounce, as some in thei 
 haste have done, Christ's Gospel of the Poor a failure 
 it will be well first to realise, as best we may, the utte 
 savagery and diabolical virulence of the institution o 
 private property as it prevailed in Pagan antiquity. 
 
 There may exist faint tracesof a primitive communism 
 in Greek and Roman institutions ; but these may be 
 safely left to the curious in " origins" and ethnology. 
 In the most ancient times of which we know anything 
 for certain, there were practically but two classes — 
 masters and slaves, owners and owned. Men and things 
 were alike property, and it is much the same to-day. 
 Society is everywhere divided into robbers and robbed. 
 There is only this difference : In the ancient world the 
 proprietor kept the toiler up to his work by the lash ; 
 in the modern world the constant dread of starvation, 
 by reason of lack of employment, has precisely the same 
 effect. 
 
 Sir Henry Sumner Maine tells us very truly that our 
 social progress has all been " from stains to contract." 
 But so long as contract, impudently called " free," is 
 in reality couipuhory, it is in essence what slavery and 
 serfdom were before it. We have changed the name, 
 but the thing remains. Usury became respectable when 
 it changed its name to "interest," and so it is with 
 slavery when it labels itself " freedom of contract." In 
 the ancient world property based itself solely on force ; 
 in the modern world its main foundation is fraud. 
 
 In the patriarchal world the paterfamilias owned every- 
 thing. He owned wife and child, just as he owned 
 cattle or household goods. They were his property, and 
 he could and did do with them as he pleased. In the 
 Tenth Commandment, which was formulated in the 
 patriarchal age, a man is forbidden to covet his neigh- 
 bour's house, his neighbour's wife, or his ox or his ass. 
 The wife was as much a chattel as ox or ass, and still
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 1 5 
 
 ore so were the children. They were all property, 
 id could be put to death by the tyrant of the house- 
 old for any offence or none. And this infernal /rt/ym 
 otcstas existed long after the patriarchal families had 
 rown into tribes, and the tribes had coalesced into 
 itates and so-called Republics. 
 
 We flatter ourselves iha.t mafnage had its origin in the 
 
 ennobling sentiment of love ; but that is a fiction of the 
 
 )oets. It was merely the primitive method of conveying 
 
 )roperty. The paterfamilias, as a rule, had many concu- 
 
 jines, but the function of the wife, whose continence 
 
 was ensured by frightful penalties, was to conceive the 
 
 precious heir. When the pativfannlias died his eldest 
 
 son stepped into his shoes. His brothers and sisters, 
 
 even those by his own mother, then became his slaves, 
 
 his pvopeyty. 
 
 But the exactions of the dead proprietor were by no 
 means over. His ghost had to be appeased and kept 
 from doing harm to the living by incessant prayers, sacri- 
 fices and libations. These it was the function of the heir 
 to offer up, and thus it came to pass that the son became 
 a priest and the father a god. Like mzxriSLge, religion or 
 ancestor- worship, was a mere incident of pvopcrty. In 
 the person of the precious heir were united all the 
 terrors of time and eternity. Church and State were 
 one and indivisible. Even that very secular person 
 Julius Ca3sar filled the office of Pontifex Maximus at 
 Rome. Religion and marriage were for the proprietary 
 class alone. The unfortunate beings without property 
 could have neither God nor wife. The "masses" 
 were things. The great aristocratic philosopher 
 Plato with much reluctance conceded them ** half a 
 soul." 
 
 Even in the palmy days of Greece and Rome the 
 number of proprietors was astonishingly small. In 
 Athens, B.C. 309, there were 515,000 inhabitants, of 
 whom only 9,000 enjoyed any political rights. There 
 were 80,000 freed men (without the suffrage), and 10,000 
 strangers under the protection of the State. The slaves 
 numbered 400,000.
 
 l6 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 In wealthy Corinth the free citizens numbered 40,000, 
 and the bond 640,000. 
 
 In Sparta the helots outnumbered the Lacedemonians 
 by three to one, and yet, nearly 1,000 B.C., the en- 
 lightened statesman Lycurgus had given the Spartans a 
 SociaHst Constitution of great perfection, which lasted 
 them for six centuries. 
 
 One feature of this Constitution was the Cryptia, or 
 ambuscade. At certain seasons the five Ephori, or 
 magistrates, sent out the most promising of the Spartan 
 youth, armed with daggers, to fall suddenly on un- 
 suspecting helots, and murder them in cold blood. 
 Without familiarity with the art of the Cryptia, the educa- 
 tion of a young gentleman of Sparta was incomplete. 
 The helots were, moreover, flogged regularly once a day 
 lor faults to be committed. 
 
 Thucydides gives us a good sample of the *' rights of 
 property " as exercised by the Spartans. During the 
 long Peloponnesian War, which lasted twenty-seven 
 years, they were at one stage so hard pressed that they 
 were obliged to arm a number of their helots. These 
 fought with great valour, and at the close of the war 
 the survivors, 2,000 in number, were promised emanci- 
 pation, and taken into one of the temples to be gar- 
 landed. Not one of them emerged alive. They were 
 all treacherously murdered by order of the Ephori, B.C. 
 424. It is satisfactory to learn that even Plato thought 
 this a somewhat high-handed proceeding. 
 
 In Rome itself, B.C. 103, only 2,000 persons were 
 considered taxable. All the rest were slaves or penni- 
 less freedmen (i.e., emancipated slaves). Property 
 ruled with a rod of iron. In early times the debtor 
 became the slave of the creditor, and if there were more 
 creditors than one, and they could not agree about their 
 common property in the debtor, they cut him up and 
 divided his limbs among them. The original Romans 
 were a nest of robbers lurking among the Seven Hills, and 
 down to the last the Roman State lived by the plunder 
 and enslavement of the world. It is befitting that our 
 " law-and-order " should be derived from such a source.
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. I J 
 
 To acquire wealth by honest labour in any form was 
 
 e deepest disgrace possible. The stigma of toil ran 
 
 iplacably in the blood, and the taint was to all intents 
 
 eradicable. Ventidius Bassus had the good fortune 
 
 become Consul. The " classes " said to him : '* You 
 
 were a muleteer." To the Emperors Galerius, Probus, 
 
 Pertinax, and Vitellius they said respectively : " You 
 
 were a swineherd;" "Your father was a gardener; " 
 
 " Your father was a freedman ; " " Your father was a 
 
 soap-maker ; " and even on the marble statue of 
 
 Augustus, in the lifetime of the Master of the World, it 
 
 was hardly possible to restrain them from writing : 
 
 ♦* Your grandfather was a merchant, and your father an 
 
 usurer." 
 
 In truth, how the Gospel of the Poor, which Christ 
 unfolded in such perfect entirety, ever found a lodg- 
 ment of any kind in a society so diametrically and in- 
 veterately opposed to all His distinctive teachings, is to 
 my mind as great a miracle (if not a greater) as any to 
 be found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. 
 
 To all who ignorantly attempt to depreciate the 
 beneficient influence of Christ on the world it is sufficient 
 to recall the famous couplet concerning the Highland 
 roads and their maker, General Wade : 
 
 Had you seen these roads before they were made, 
 You would lift up your hands and bless General Wade.
 
 i8 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR, 
 
 No. IV. 
 
 ••STRIKES" B.C. 150-70. 
 
 They (the early Christians) knew that Jesus proclaimed a ^oe' 
 news or gospel for the poor, the very foundation-stone of which is 
 the absolute equality, liberty, and fraternity of man ; and they 
 learned from the same Divine Teacher that kings, lords, nobles, all 
 personal and class distinctions among men, are the mere creation 
 of legal fiction, sustained by unjust force, like slavery and piracy, 
 and do not exist in the nature of things, or by the will of God ; and 
 that these laws are everywhere only the utterances of selfishness 
 crystalized into the form of statutes, customs, or decrees, govern- 
 ment over the peof)le being nothing more nor less than an organ- 
 ized expression of faith in the ancient lie that " private properly " 
 ^in estates, rank, or prerogatives) is the one thing sacred in human 
 life, and that laws and penalties are necessary to maintain it ; which 
 faith is the idolatry of " Mammon," the only Paganism that Jesus 
 denounced by name, and declared to be utterly antagonistic to the 
 worship of God. — " Arius, thb Libyan. 
 
 I believe such words as "fashionable," "exclusive," "aristo- 
 cratic," and the like to be wicked, unchristian epithets that ought 
 to be banished from honest vocabularies. You who despise your 
 neighbour, you who forget your friends, meanly to follow after 
 those of a higher degree ; you who are ashamed of your poverty 
 and blush at your calling, are a snob, as are you who boast of your 
 wealth, or are proud of your pedigree. — Thackeray. 
 
 In Pagan antiquity, free and bond, oppressors and 
 oppressed alike acknowledged but one moral code, the 
 stern Lex Talionis — ** an eye for an eye and a tooth for 
 a tooth." Nor did the oppressors have it, at all times, 
 their own way. There were occasions when the ancient 
 chattel-slaves " struck " for improved conditions of 
 servitude, just as our modern wages-slaves ever and
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. IQ 
 
 again " strike " for shorter hours or larger pay. To 
 abolish the entire system of " private property,'' both 
 in persons and in things, as enjoined by Christ, has, 
 alas, at no time been the aim of any considerable body 
 of the workers of the world. And if the conception is 
 too revolutionary to be grasped by the enlightened 
 "Trade-Unionist" of to-day, is it to be wondered at 
 that the most desperate efforts of tlie chattel-slaves of the 
 ancient world to emancipate themselves ended in signal 
 failure ? They produced able and resolute chiefs, who 
 often led them to surprising temporary victories, even 
 over the legions of all-conquering Rome, but, the 
 Kingdom of Heaven not being within, their external 
 triumphs, could, and did, only end in eventual 
 disaster. 
 
 Before the advent of Christ a " strike " necessarily 
 meant an armed insurrection. " Resist not evil" was a 
 strange precept against which the vast armaments of 
 modern Europe are a living testimony that the anti- 
 Christian lex talionis is still in the ascendant, and tliat 
 the principle of mutual love — the Fatherhood of God 
 and the Brotherhood of Man — is now, as always, 
 scouted by the "sovereigns ^nd statesmen" of the 
 earth. 
 
 The strike-wars of antiquity — the efforts of the Pagan 
 Messiahs to free the workers from their bonds by force 
 of arms — are among the obscurest episodes m the 
 annals of mankind. The reason is not far to seek — 
 contemporary history was all written by the bitterest foes of 
 the toilers, and it is very difficult to read between the 
 lines. Yet from about 150 to 70 b,c. something like the 
 " Universal Strike," which is sometimes threatened 
 even in our own day, prevailed. From Asia Minor to 
 the Pillars of Hercules, relentless war raged between 
 the "masses" and the "classes." In Asia Minor, 
 Aristonicus of Pergamus ; in the island of Chios (Scio), 
 l)rimakos ; in Sicily, Eunus, Athenion, and Salvius ; 
 in Italy, Spartacus ; and in Spain, Viriatlius, were the 
 Alexanders, the Hannibals, and the Julius Caesars of 
 the ancient " masses,"
 
 20 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 How these Pagan Messiahs preached their Gospel of 
 the Poor may, to sj:ns extent, be surmised from the 
 following episodes : — 
 
 Sicily became a province of the Empire b.c. 210, and 
 nowhere was the condition of the poor slaves so intoler- 
 able. Atrocities that make the llesh creep were of 
 every day occurrence. Among the worst of the op- 
 pressors was a millionaire slave-owner named Damo- 
 philus. He had long been execrated for his abominable 
 cruelties, and his wife Megallis was, if possible, still 
 more truculent. It was not unusual with her to flog 
 female slaves to death with her own hand. This vile 
 couple had a beautiful daughter who did her best to 
 mitigate the suiTerings of her parents' victims, and for 
 a time her humanity staved off catastrophe. But re- 
 tribution came at last. A sudden rising of the slaves 
 took place in the mountain town of Enna, b.c. 143. 
 The leader of the revolt was a Prophet or Messiah, 
 named Eunus. He was a thaumaturgist, who could 
 spit fire and perform a number of feats that inspired his 
 *elIow-slaves with unbounded confidence in him. It is 
 Act a little singular that this man had been brought 
 from Apamea, a few leagues to the north oi Nazareth. 
 Well, before Eunus as judge, sitting in the auditorium 
 of the theatre of Enna, were brought Damophilus and 
 Megallis. Damophilus made a cunning defence, and 
 no small impression on the slave jury, who might have 
 acquitted him had not Zeuxes and Hermias, two of his 
 worst victims, rushed forward and decapitated him on 
 the spot. 
 
 As for the fiendish Megallis, her fate was even 
 more tragic. Eunus handed her over to a jury of 
 her female slaves. They tore her fine clothing from her 
 back, and hurried her, bruised and bleeding, to the 
 brink of a frightful precipice, whence she was hurled 
 into the abyss below. It is pleasant to learn that the 
 insurgent slaves, in their fury, were not unmindful of 
 the goodness of the daughter. Every care was taken 
 for her protection. Her father's executioner, Hermias, 
 with a strong bodyguard, at great risk conveyed her in
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 21 
 
 safety to some of her relatives in the distant city of 
 Catana, on the coast. 
 
 With regard to this slave-strike, Diodorus Siculus 
 hazards the following observation, perhaps unparalleled 
 in the writings of any ancient pagan historian: 
 
 " These slaves on strike demonstrated in showing no 
 sympathy or mercy to those who had been their masters, 
 and in delivering themselves up to their own violence 
 and wrath, that what they did was not the mean 
 promptings of barbarity, but a just retribution or punish- 
 ment for the injustice that had been done them." 
 
 For nearly ten years the revolt prospered, and the 
 " classes " were all but exterminated. But the fire- 
 spitting Eunus must needs take to himself the title and 
 style of " King," an office odious even to the *' classes " of 
 Rome. He could no more enter the Kingdom of Heaven 
 than Dives, and cruel concupiscent Rome sealed his 
 fate at last amid crucifixions and strangulations innu- 
 merable. 
 
 A yet more singular and in every way preferable Mes- 
 siah of the miserable outcasts of ancient society was 
 Drimakos, the slave of Chios. Drimakos not merely 
 asserted that he acted under the direct counsel of the 
 Almighty, but succeeded in persuading the Chian slave- 
 owners that the Gods had for once espoused the cause 
 of the slave. 
 
 The extraordinary episode of his death doubtless 
 greatly strengthened the belief in his supernatural 
 powers. He had imposed treaty-guaranteed blackmail 
 on the defeated Chians, and from his mountain fast- 
 nesses had exacted it for many years, v/hen they 
 treacherously offered a large reward in gold for his head. 
 The old man took a singular resolution. Calling to him 
 a young runaway slave, his sole confidant, he said : 
 " Boy, I have brought thee up nearest to me, evet 
 with the emotions of confidence and love, more than 
 that felt for all others of mankind. Thou art child and 
 son, and all that is dear to me. I have lived out my 
 span. I have lived long enough; but thou art still 
 young and hast blood, and hope and sprightliness, and
 
 2a THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 there is much before thee. Thou shalt become a gooc 
 and brave man. Son, the city of the Chians is offering 
 to him that bringeth them my head a sum of money 
 and promising him liis freedom. Therefore thy duty i; 
 to cut off my head, take it to them, receive thy reward 
 return to thy fatherland, and be happy." The youtli 
 was horrified, but the inexorable Old RIan of the Moun- 
 tains sternly exacted obedience. Drimakos calmly 
 laid his head on the block. His young friend struck it 
 off, buried the body, carried the head to the city, and 
 duly received his reward. 
 
 The death of Drimakos was soon mourned as a 
 calamity by bond and free, and a splendid temple, 
 whose ruins still endure, speedily rose over his tomb. 
 The Slave King of "Scio's rocky isle" became a god. 
 
 It remains to note the fate of Spartacus, the Gladiator, 
 the last, and by far the greatest of the Labour-leaders 
 of the Pagan world. Like the cream of the Roman 
 " classes," the illustrious Gracchi (Tiberius and Caius) 
 and Blossius, he looked wistfully for the advent of a 
 World-Messiah, but does not himself appear to have 
 laid claim to any special inspiration. But his wife — con- 
 sort, shall I say, for no slave could have a wife — was a 
 soothsayer to whom alone in direst straits he looked for 
 wise counsel and moral support. As for personal am- 
 bition, he seems to have been conspicuously and honour- 
 ably devoid of it, and there is reason to believe that he 
 had, in some measure, grasped the social and political 
 principles of which Christ's Kingdom of Heaven was 
 afterwards the completed, •' fulfilled " expression. 
 
 Anyhow, the " classes " of all time cannot deny htm 
 the possession, in the highest degree, of all those quali- 
 ties, which by common consent they exalt in their own 
 military demi-gods, Alexander the Great, Pyrrhus the 
 Epirot, Hannibal the Carthaginian, the Roman Cassar, 
 the Corsican Bonaparte, the Prussian Moltke, and 
 similar colossal ecourges of humanity. He was never 
 excelled in the art of handling huge bodies of men in 
 the battle-field ; v/hile in personal prowess, beneficence 
 of purpose, and magnanimity of character he easily sur-
 
 THE GOSfEL OF THE POOlt. ^3 
 
 )assed them all. He routed in succession eleven 
 ;onsular or pro-consular armies, and the episode of his 
 leath in his last great battle of Silaurus, d.c. 70, was of 
 iurpassing grandeur. 
 
 The war had lasted four years, and three Roman 
 losts were massed against him, Crassus and Pompey 
 )eing in command. They brouglit the hero his 
 charger. With a stroke of his sword' he slew the rear- 
 ing steed, and shouting to his men, " Victorious, I shall 
 find horses in plenty among the enemj' ; defeated, I 
 shall no longer want one," he fell upon the Roman ranks 
 in personal combat. *' It was a fierce fight," says 
 Appian. " Long after victory was hopeless Spartacus 
 was traced by the heaps of slain who had fallen by his 
 hand, and his body was lost completely in the awful 
 carnage which closed that day of blood." His aim was 
 to slay the hated and hateful millionaire Crassus, and 
 he all but succeeded, killing at the foot of his standard 
 two centurions of the Roman's bodyguard with his 
 brand. Florus, who maligns Spartacus most bitterly, 
 admits : " He fell, fighting most valorously in the front 
 rank, like a Roman Imperator." 
 
 Thus perished the last of the great Labour-Leaders 
 of the ancient world. He lost, and the "classes" 
 gloated over a million retaliatory crucifixions. The 
 next Great Labour- Leader was crucified one hundred 
 years later on Mount Calvary, but from His Cross He 
 still directs the grand struggle for human emancipation 
 which will one day be accomplished. 
 
 " Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty."
 
 24 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 No. V. 
 
 "THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS." 
 
 In the eighth century before Christ, in the heart of a world of 
 idolatrous polytheists, the Prophet Micah put forth a conception 
 of religion which appears to me to be as wonderful an inspiration of 
 genius as the Art of Phidias or the science of Aristotle: "And 
 what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and love mercy, 
 and to walk humbly with thy God ? " If any so-called religion takes 
 away from this grand saying of Micah, I think that it wantonly 
 mutilates; while if it adds thereto, I ihink it also obscures the 
 perfect ideal of religion. The antagonism of science is not to 
 religion, but to the heathen survivals and the bad philosophy under 
 which religion itself is well nigh crushed. And for my part I trust 
 that this antagonism will never cease, and that till the end of time 
 true science will continue to fulfil one of her most beneficent func- 
 tions — that of relieving men from a burden of false science which is 
 imposed upon them in the name of religion. — Professor Huxley. 
 
 I think the necessity very great that invites all classes, all religious 
 men, whatever their connection, whatever their specialities in what- 
 ever relation they stand to Christianity, to unite in a movement of 
 benefit to men, under the sanction of religion. We are all very 
 sensible — it is forced on us every day — of the feeling that the 
 Churches are outgrown, that the creeds are outgrown, that a 
 technical theology no longer suits us. It is not the ill-will of the 
 people, no, indeed; but the incapacity for confirming themselves 
 tlierein. — Emerson. 
 
 The first division of the Old Testament is the Law 
 or " Torah " (teaching), as the Jews call it. To us the 
 Law is more generally known as the Pentateuch or 
 " book in five parts." 
 
 Hitherto, Jew, Moslem, and Christian have been 
 accustomed to attribute tliis five-fold collection bodily 
 to Moses, the great Leader of the Hebrew Exodus from 
 Egypt ; but to this view the latest school of Biblical
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 2$ 
 
 criticism has presented very serious objections. Tiiree 
 redactions of the materials composing these books, it is 
 contended can be traced: the first about B.C. 750, the 
 second b.c. 620, and the third and final by Erza, B.C. 
 444, In point of fact, such Prophets as Amos, 790-780 
 B.C., Isaiah, 757 B.C., Jeremiah 621, and Eze'kiel 597 
 B.C., would thus antedate the Pentateuch as we know 
 it. 
 
 But the point is immaterial so far as the " Gospel of 
 the Poor " is concerned. Tliere is no reasonable 
 historic doubt that before Troy was sacked or Rome was 
 founded, Moses was the Deliverer and Lawgiver of the 
 unique people to whom the entire human race stands so 
 heavily indebted in all its most precious spiritual and 
 ethical posessions. Whoever might raise the super- 
 structure, the foundation stones of the ideal Kingdom 
 of Heaven on earth were laid by him. Tiie Mosaic 
 tradition inspired the Prophets with the Messianic hope. 
 Hence Christ's averment, that He came not to destroy 
 the Law and the Prophets but to fulfil them. Moses 
 was the Messiah of one insignificant people ; Christ of 
 all mankind. Eliminate from the Scriptures the idea of 
 evolution, and they become a mass of inconsequences and 
 contradictions. 
 
 In the glimpses of Greek and Roman society, given in 
 the last two chapters, I tried to convey to the reader some 
 notion of the vast substratum of slavery on which these 
 ancient "civilizations" rested. They were in truth 
 hotbeds of human suffering, in which even the freedman 
 or emancipated slave was treated with unbounded con- 
 tumely. Honest toil, bond or free, was an ineffaceable 
 disgrace. The *' classes " had a monopoly of the Gods 
 as of everything else, and from them the emancipated 
 must needs " borrow " a Deity if religiously disposed. 
 "Law and order," divine and human, concerned itself 
 with the protection of the "private property" and 
 general welfare of the rich alone. 
 
 Contrast this hopeless state of society with the 
 Hebrew Constitution as outlined by Moses. That 
 Constitution, it is true, was by no means perfect ; but
 
 25 tHE GOSfEL OF THE fOOR. 
 
 its God was the Righteous God of the entire nation, and 
 its keystone the welfare of the poor rather than of the 
 rich ; its watch-word " humanity " not " property." 
 
 And this is all the more remarkable when we consider 
 out of what a furnace of slavery the Israelites emerged. 
 The bondage of Greece and Rome was, after all, but 
 child's play compared with the immemorial iron des- 
 potism of the Pharoaus. In Greece and Rome the 
 "classes" had a high sense of freedom and justice 
 among themselves ; in Egypt the autocracy allowed not 
 even the most exalted to cherish such sentiments. 
 
 Unnumbered millions of men wore out lives of priva- 
 tion and misery in erecting tombs to royal taskmasters 
 — pyramids as durable as the everlasting hills, which, 
 even in these days of Cyclopean engineering, are the 
 astonishment of mankind. 
 
 For generations the Hebrews had suffered in 
 this unparalleled "house of bondage" when Moses 
 organised his grand, ever memorable " strike." He had 
 none to appeal to but a herd of idolatrous slaves, and yet, 
 with such unpromising materials to handle, he framed the 
 most indestructible, asbestos-like polity, spiritual and 
 temporal, known to the annals of mankind. Assuredly 
 in the whole range of old-world achievement, none was 
 comparable to this. 
 
 What then, in brief, is the Mosaic " Social Compact ?" 
 It first of all postulates that there is but one landlord, 
 Jehovah, and that under Him possession or tenancy is 
 to be equal for all His people : — 
 
 The land shall not be sold in perpetuity ; for it is Mine : for ye are 
 strangers and sojourners with me. — Levit. xxv., 23. 
 
 To many thou shalt give the more inheritance, and to few thou 
 shalt give the less inheritance ; to every one shall his inheritance 
 be given according to those that were numbered of him. — Numbers 
 XXVI., 54. 
 
 Moses, was, moreover, in one important respect, the 
 first asserter of •' woman's rights " on record : — 
 
 And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel saying, If a 
 man die and have no son, then ye shall cause his inheritance to pass 
 unto his daughter. — Numbers xxvn.,8. 
 
 Nor did the Hebrew Legislator, like the British
 
 THE GOSPEL 0? THE POOR. ^7 
 
 Parliament and judiciary, concern himself with petty 
 larcenies alone. He did not, Uke these, rigorously 
 
 condemn the man or woman 
 
 Who stenls the goose from off the common; 
 
 But let the greater villain loose 
 
 Who steals the common from the goose. 
 
 To remove ''landmarks" was to incur the severest 
 maledictions : — 
 
 Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour's landmark. And all 
 the people shall say Amen. — Deut. xxvii., 17. 
 
 Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, 
 till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of 
 the earth. — Isaiah v., 8. 
 
 When Ahab set his heart on the acquisition of Naboth's 
 vineyard, it is to be noted that he offered the Jezrcehte 
 either '• a better vineyard than it " or the " worth of it 
 in money" — in a word, ample *' compensation for dis- 
 turbance." But Naboth very properly declined to part 
 with the cherished "inheritance of his fathers," small 
 though it might be. He was content with his " lot," 
 and had no insensate desire to lay " field to field," or to 
 encourage even his Monarch in so doing. 
 
 The King and Queen eventually, by foul play, con- 
 verted the coveted vineyard into a royal "garden of 
 herbs," but at what a cost ! It was not Elijah, the 
 Tishbite, alone that hotly denounced the transaction. 
 There was not a horticulturist or agriculturist in Israel 
 that did not revolt against so serious a violation of the 
 Mosaic Code in respect of the sacred right of the 
 humblest to sit under his own patrimonial vine and fig- 
 tree, with none to make him afraid. 
 
 What would Elijah, the Tishbite have had to say to 
 a Highland clearance, or such unbridled landlordism 
 as, in the forties, condemned, in the name of rent, a 
 million and a quarter of Irish men, women, and 
 children to death by hunger in the midst of plenty of 
 their own creation ? During the famine Ireland was 
 relatively the greatest food-exporting country in the 
 world ! ^ 
 
 The Law, as I have said, did not perfect any Utopian
 
 t8 THE GOSPEL 01? THE POOR. 
 
 system. Though founded on abiding principles of 
 Cfi'iity it had to be adapted to the time and circum- 
 stances of its promulgation. For example, a man 
 pecuniarily embarrassed, miglit part with his own in- 
 terest in the soil, but he could not long prejudice the 
 rights of his offspring. Every fiftieth year came the 
 Jubilee, when all land thus temporarily alienated «o/^w5 
 volais reverted to the kindred to whom it had originally 
 been allotted : — 
 
 Then shalt thou cause the trump jt of the Jubilee to sound . . . . 
 throughout all your land. 
 
 And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throufjh- 
 out all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof ; it shall be a Jubilee 
 unto you ; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and 
 every man unto his family. — Levit. xxv., 9, 10. 
 
 Thus, on the Great Day of Atonement, did the 
 shivering blast of the Jubilee trumpets periodically 
 annihilate in Israel all the monstrous evils of landlordism 
 and landlessness which innearly every country threaten 
 modern " civilization " with disaster if not destruction. 
 Nay, so vigilant was the Law to maintain the principle 
 of equal possessory rights in the soil, that it made ample 
 provision for redemption before the year of Jubilee, 
 should the ex-possessor, by himself or friend, be able 
 so to redeem : — 
 
 If thy brother be waxen poor, and hath sold away some of his 
 possession, and if any of his kin come to redeem it, then shall he 
 redeem that which his brother sold. 
 
 And if the man have none to redeem it, and himself be able to 
 redeem it : 
 
 Then let him count the years of the sale thereof, and restore the 
 overplus to the man to whom he sold it ; that he may return 
 unto his possession. — Levit. xxv., 25, 26, 27. 
 
 The rationale of the Jubilee is thus lucidly explained 
 by Flavins Joseplius in his " Antiquities " : — 
 
 *' When the Jubilee is come which denotes Liberty, 
 he that sold the land and he that bought it meet to- 
 gether and make an estimate on one hand of the fruits 
 gathered, and on the other of the expenses laid out 
 upon it. If the fruits gathered come to more than the 
 expense laid out, he that sold it takes the land again ;
 
 THE GOSPE'f OF THE POOR. 29 
 
 but if the expenses prove more than the fruits, the 
 present possessor receives of the former the difference 
 that was wanting, and leaves the land to him ; and if 
 the fruits received and the expenses laid out prove 
 equal to one another, the present possessor relinquishes 
 to the former holders,'*
 
 30 Tlili GOSPEL OV THE POOR. 
 
 No. VI. 
 
 "THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS." 
 
 From the time of fbe first reputed murder, according to the Jewish 
 Bible, down to the present, this question of avarice has, more than 
 all other things, been at the root of evil and crime, ignorance and 
 unspeakable suffering. — Rev. James Macdonald. 
 
 This, in a word, is the " labour problem." The 'Church" must 
 squarely take the side of labour against capital — not, iiideed, the side 
 of ?he "working man" against the -'capitalist" — but the side of 
 Iribour, labour of hand, or head, or heart, against the power of capital, 
 tlie money power, the power to corrupt, to bribe, to unman the power 
 which reduces "men ' to the level of " things," makes merchandise 
 of all sacred human ministries. The "World" very frankly and 
 flistinctly subordinates "man" to "mammon," and is governed by 
 its "commercial interests." The Church ought to accept the 
 challenge, ought just as frankly and distinctly to subordinate mammon 
 to man, and ought to be governed by purely " human and divine 
 i.'.terests." This is the kind of " Socialism " that I freely and gladly 
 f)rofess. — Rev. Charles Ferguson, Syracuse, U.S.A. 
 
 It is said of the Catholic Madame Guion, that she met in her 
 vision an angel bearing a furnace and a pot of water. "Whither 
 goest tliou ? " she a^.ked. "I go with this furnace to burn up 
 i'aiadise, and with this water to quench Hell, that men may here- 
 afier love God without fear and without hope of reward." 
 
 The farm which fell by lot to each Hebrew family on 
 the occupation of Canaan, it has been estimated, ex- 
 tended to about twenty acres, and this possession, as 
 has been seen, tlie Mosaic institution of the Jubilee 
 rendered inalienable in the posterity of the original allot- 
 tees. Every fifty years Jehovah, the sole Lord of the 
 Soil, resumed ownership ot the entire land, and re-granted 
 each group of offspring its ancestral domain.
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 3I 
 
 The constitution was thus periodically renovated 
 according to its first principles, and private landlordism, 
 with its inevitable train of human miseries, nipped in 
 the bud. Every man in Israel might sit under his own 
 vine and fig-tree, with none to make him afraid. 
 
 In the Greek and Roman world it was very different. 
 There, no year of Jubilee was known, and land monopoly 
 speedily divided even the free citizens into two bitterly 
 hostile camps — the patricians and plebeians — the pre- 
 cursors of the ** classes " and " masses " of to-day. 
 How sad and hopeless the oft-quoted words of Pliny : 
 '• Great estates (latifundia) have ruined Italy and the 
 Provinces as well." The evil consequences which Moses 
 prevented by the institution of the Jubilee, our wise 
 agriculturists, in conference assembled, lately sought to 
 undo by " protection " and *' bimetallism " ! 
 
 And hardly less remarkable than the Jubilee was the 
 Seventh or Sabbatical Year: — 
 
 And six years thou shalt sow the land and gather in the increase 
 thereof; 
 
 But the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie fallow ; that 
 the poor of thy people may eat ; and what they leave the beasts of 
 the field shall eat. In like manner thou shalt deal with thy vine- 
 yard and thy olive yard. — Exodus xxiii., 10, 11. 
 
 In those primitive days there was of course no such 
 thing as " scientific farming." The plough was rudi- 
 mentary in form, and manuring and crop-rotation were 
 little, if at all, understood. Consequently the " year of 
 rest to the land " was a wise provision to prevent 
 exhaustion of the soil. 
 
 But what is most significant is, that in the six years 
 of ploughing, sowing, and reaping, the Hebrew yeomen 
 should have been able to store up enough to keep them 
 and theirs in comfort for a whole year without making 
 any demand on the soil whatever, the spontaneous 
 fruits of field and orchard being the portion of the poor. 
 Conceive of the producers of this country being able 
 every seven years to take a twelve months' holiday ! 
 
 And yet, with just laws controlling the production, 
 and still more the distribution of wealth, there is no
 
 32 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOS, 
 
 reason why we should not have our Sabbatical Year as 
 well as those for whom Moses legislated over three 
 thousand years ago. 
 
 Even in ancient Collectivist Peru, if the best authori- 
 ties are to be believed, production was 2L\v!a.ys four yean 
 ahead of consumption. With us, alas, in this horrible 
 swelter of competition, which is the mainspring of our 
 so-called '* civilization,'' life (for all honest producers 
 at least) has become so utterly a hand-to-mouth affaif 
 that it may justly be described as the Universal Same 
 Qui Pent; and I entirely agree with John Stuart- Mill, 
 when he says : — 
 
 " If the bulk of the human race are always to remain, 
 as at present — slaves to toil in which they have no 
 interest, and, therefore, feel no interest — drudging from 
 early morn till late at night for bare necessaries, and 
 with all the intellectual and moral deficiencies which 
 that implies — without resources either in mind or feeling 
 — untaught, for they cannot be better taught than fed ; 
 selfish, for all their thoughts are required for themselves ; 
 without interests or sentiments as citizens and members 
 of society, and with a sense of injustice rankling in their 
 minds, equally for what they have not and what others 
 have — I know not what there is which should make a 
 person of any capacity of reason concern himself about 
 the destinies of the human race." 
 
 ** Untaught, for they cannot be better taught than 
 fed!" True; and Moses, as will be seen, recognised 
 the fact. He made the Sabbatical Year, when physical 
 industry was relaxed, the occasion for a large measure 
 of mental activity and instruction. The nation was 
 sent to school : — 
 
 And Moses commanded them saying : At the end of every seven 
 years, in the set time of the year of release, in the Feast of Tibet- 
 nacles. 
 
 When all Israel is come before the Lord thy God in the 
 place which he shall choose, thou shalt read this Law before all 
 Israel in their hearing. 
 
 Assemble the people, the men and the women and the littit; 
 ones, and the stranger that is within :hy gates, that they may hear 
 and that they may learn, and fear the Lord your God and observe 
 to do all the words of this lawj
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR 3^ 
 
 And that their children, who have not known, may learn, and 
 fear the Lord your God, as long as ye live in the land whither ye 
 go over Jordan to possess it. — Deut. xxxi., 10-13. 
 
 Now, it is to be observed about this Law that it was 
 a compendium relating to matters of purely mundane 
 interest. There is not a breath of otherworldlincss about 
 it. It is concerned with history, biography, economics, 
 sanitation, taxation, the administration of justice, the 
 conduct of war, and a great variety of other topics ; but 
 not one word is said about the immortality of the soul, 
 or any system of rewards or punishments after death. 
 
 All the sanctions of the Law affect the living alone. 
 It was things secular that were sacred. Indeed, as Mr. 
 Fred Verinder lately put it, in the Church Refoymev, in a 
 searching series of articles on " The Bible and the Land 
 Question," the '* subjects '' are " exactly comparable to 
 those discussed in our Sunday newspapers and at the 
 Sunday meetings in working men's clubs, to the great 
 dissatisfaction of those who profess the most reverence 
 for the Law which made the study of all these ' secular ' 
 matters a sacred duty, and provided the weekly rest-day 
 and the Sabbath- Year in order to set men free to study 
 them." 
 
 Jehovah inspired alike artizan and husbandman. 
 The prophets had no monopoly of divine inspiration : — 
 
 And the Lord spake unto Moses saying : 
 
 See, I have called by name Bezaleel, the son of TJri, the son of 
 Hur, of the tribe of Judah. 
 
 And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in 
 understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, 
 
 To devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in 
 brass. 
 
 And in cutting of stones for setting, and in carving of wood to 
 work in all manner of workmanship. — Exod. xxxi., 1-5. 
 
 Give ye ear, and hear my voice. Doth the plowman plow con- 
 tinually to sow ? 
 
 When he hath made plain the face thereof, doth he not cast 
 abroad the fitches and scatter the cummin, and put in the wheat in 
 rows, and the barley in the appointed place, and the spelt in the 
 border thereof ? 
 
 For his God doth instruct him aright, and doth teach him. — 
 Isaiah xxviii., 23-26. 
 
 Here we have the true and broad as opposed to the 
 c
 
 34 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 thousand false and contracted theories of Revelation. 
 The deft mechanic, or tiller of the soil is as truly inspired 
 of God as ever was prophet, priest, or savant. Their 
 functions are equally, if not more, sacred. "This also 
 Cometh forth from Jehovah of Hosts whose counsel is 
 miraculous, and His wisdom great." Just as we are 
 only beginning to grasp the true import of Christ's 
 mission, so are we only as yet groping after a correct 
 rationale of Revelation. 
 
 But the Sabbatical Year brought with it something 
 more than a cessation from husbandry. It cancelled 
 the personal debts of the poor, just as the Jubilee 
 restored his land to the mortgagor. 
 
 At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release. 
 
 And this is the manner of the release : Every creditor shall release 
 that which he hath lent unto his neighbour ; he shall not exact it of 
 his neighbour or of his brother, because the Lord's release hath been 
 proclaiiTTcd. 
 
 Howbeit, there shall be no poor with thee ; for the Lord will 
 surely bless thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee 
 to possess it, if only thou diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord 
 thy God to observe to do all this commandment. — Deut. xv., 
 
 I. 2.4, 5. 
 
 Such then was the main feature of the Mosaic Poor 
 Law. The more fortunate neighbour was bound to lend 
 to the less fortunate, and if the latter could not repay 
 him when the Sabbatical Year came round, the loan 
 was blotted out. Not to lend to the needy, even on the 
 eve of the year of release, was a " sin " ; to lend was to 
 be blessed. 
 
 Beware that there be not a base thought in thine heart, saying, 
 the seventh year, the year of release, is at hand ; and thy eye be 
 evil against thy poor brother, and thou give him nought ; and he 
 cry unto the Lord against thee, and it be sin unto thee. 
 
 Thou shalt surely give him, and thine heart shall not be greived 
 when thou givest unto him, because that for this thing the Lord thy 
 God shall bless thee in all thy work, and in all thou puttest thy 
 hand unto. — Deut. xv., 9, 10. 
 
 The problem of how best to relieve the necessities of 
 the poor must always cry aloud for solution wherever 
 *' private property" is an institution, and the processes 
 of production and distribution are left to competition 
 instead of co-operation. Now, the Hebrew commanity.
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 35 
 
 with every safeguard against abuse, was constituted on 
 an Individualist basis, and poor there consequently were 
 to be cared for. But poverty was not treated as we pre- 
 tended Christians treat it. The poor were not thrust into 
 workhouse bastiles and treated like criminals to the loss 
 of all self-respect and manhood. They were Jehovah's 
 poor, and it was the duty of every well-to-do neighbour 
 not merely to minister to their immedia-te wants, but to 
 encourage them by sympathetic counsel, the only kind 
 of help that is really serviceable in the end — the help 
 that enables the unfortunate, the weak, or the erring to 
 help themselves. 
 
 It is most creditable to the Hebrew race that to this 
 day, in their world-wide scattered communities, they 
 are the faithful custodians of their own poor.
 
 36 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 No. VII. 
 
 ••THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS." 
 
 That which is called the Christian Religion existed among thft 
 ancients, and never did not exist from the planting of the human 
 race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, 
 which already subsisted, began to be called Christianity. — St. 
 
 AUGWSTINE. 
 
 Many things are called Christianity — a name dear or hateful, aa 
 you define it one way or another ; often it means repeating a liturgy 
 and attending church or chapel ; sometimes it means burning men 
 alive ; in half the United States of America it meant kidnapping 
 enslaving men and women. The greatest heroism of our day spends 
 itself in lanes and alleys, in the haunts of poverty and crime, seeking 
 to bless such as the institutions of the age can only curse. If Jesus 
 of Nazareth were to come back and be Jesus of London, I ttunk I 
 know what (negative and positive) work He would set about. He 
 would begin a new Revolution of Institutions, applying His universal 
 justice to the causes of all ; but also an Angel of Mercy, palliating 
 the effects of those causes, which could not be at once removed or 
 made null. — Theodore Parker. 
 
 Thy Kingdom Come. — Matthew vi., io. 
 
 Did the Mosaic Constitution recognise the institution 
 of slavery ? Most commentators assume that it did ; 
 but if such were indeed the case, slavery as it was in 
 Israel and as it was among the Egyptians, Greeks, 
 Romans, or Carthaginians, differed not merely in degree, 
 but in kind. A Hebrew servant or slave, unless he were a 
 thief unable to make restitution, was seemingly his own 
 vendor. And just as he could part with his patrimony 
 in the land only for a term, so only for a term could he 
 " sell " himself to another : — 
 
 And if thy brother be waxen poor with thee, and sell himself to 
 the@, thou shalt not make him to serve as a bond servant;
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 37 
 
 As an hired servant and a sojourner he shall be with thee ; he 
 shall servo with thee until the year of Jubilee ; 
 
 Then shall he go out from thee, he and his children with him 
 and shall return unto his own family, and unto the possession of 
 his fathers shall he return. 
 
 For they are My servants whom I bronght forth out of the land 
 of Egypt ; they shall not be sold as bondmen. 
 
 Thou shalt not rule over him with rigour ; but shalt fear thy 
 God.— Levit. XXV., 39-43. 
 
 Nor is it difficult to divine the reason for this peculiar 
 contract of sale. With few exceptions, the entire 
 nation was made up of husbandmen and herdsmen. 
 Consequently, if a citizen parted with his interest in the 
 soil, for however brief a space, his means of subsistence 
 were gone, and his best course would naturally be to 
 serve another, say, the mortgagee of his farm, till the 
 advent of the Jubilee. 
 
 The ordinary term of service, however, seems to have 
 been for six years, and not till the Jubilee : — 
 
 If thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto 
 thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou 
 shalt let him go free from thee. 
 
 And when thou lettest him go free from' thee, thou shalt not let 
 him go empty : 
 
 Thou shalt furnish him liberally out Of thy flock, and out of thy 
 threshing floor, and out of thy wine press ; as the Lord thy God hath 
 blessed thee shalt thou give unto him. 
 
 It shall not seem hard unto thee when thou lettest him go free 
 from thee ; for to the double of the hire of an hireling hath he 
 served thee six years ; and the Lord thy God shall bless thee in all 
 that thou doest. — ^Dbut. xv,, 12, 13, 14, 18. 
 
 A poor Hebrew selling himself to a wealthy " stranger " 
 or non-naturalised citizen needed not to wait till the 
 Jubilee for release if he or his could redeem him : 
 
 And he shall reckon with him that bought him from the year that 
 he sold himself to him unto the year of Jubilee; and, the price of 
 his sale shall be according to the number of years, according to the 
 time of an hired servant shall he be with him. 
 
 If there be yet many years, according to them shall he give back 
 the price of his redemption out of the money he was bought for. 
 
 And if there remain but few years unto the year of Jubilee.t hen 
 he shall reckon with him ; according unto the years shall he give 
 back the price of his redemption.— Levit. xxv., 50, 51, 5a. 
 
 If the slave or servant was aggrieved by the treat*
 
 38 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 ment to which he was subjected, he might run away 
 with impunity. 
 
 Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant who is 
 escaped from his master unto thee. 
 
 He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he 
 shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best ; thou 
 shalt not oppress him. — Deut. xxiii., 15, 16. 
 
 Kidnapping was a capital offence : 
 
 If a man be found stealin.q any of his brethren of the children 
 of Israel, and maketh merchandise of him, or selieth him ; then that 
 thief shall die ; and thou shalt put away evil from among you.— 
 
 DkUT. XXIV., 7. 
 
 Such, then, were the leading principles which regu- 
 lated the relations of Labour and Capital among the 
 Ancient Hebrews. They were not perfect, and some 
 of the subsidiary rules laid down seem in places to 
 derogate from them. But for the time and circum- 
 stances in which they took legislative form they were 
 a marvel of humanitarian achievement. The hardness 
 of the Hebrew heart was a thing not easy to overcome, 
 otherwise, a greater than Moses has assured us, they 
 would have been better. The Mosaic Labour Laws at 
 least secured for the man who had temporarily lost 
 control of the means of production on his own account, 
 requisite food, raiment, and shelter, and in addition 
 something like an outfit when his service was ended, 
 and he came again into his patrimony. 
 
 What would not our own hopelessly toiling, utterly 
 disinherited " wage-slaves " give for the prospect of 
 such a termination of their ceaseless servitude ? What 
 inalienable vine and figtree can they hope to sit under, 
 in their old age, with none to make them afraid f 
 Their vine is the workhouse, and their figtree the 
 public asylum, with heartless officialdom to embitter 
 existence at its close. While their strength lasts they 
 also "sell" themselves for a "price" — the price of 
 one-third of their labour's worth ; but for them, alas, 
 there is neither redemption, seventh year of releascj 
 nor year of Jubilee. 
 
 And such assuredly will continue to be the sad fate 
 of the toilers until they determinedly resolve to compel
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 39 
 
 the Legislature to take a leaf out of the Code of the 
 great Hebrew Lawgiver, and restore to every man Iiis 
 birthright in the soil of his native land. I do not, of 
 course, mean that we are, Moses-wise, to redistribute 
 the land by lot in equal portions among the whole 
 people. That were, indeed, in our complex society, 
 impossible ; for " history " never really, as so often 
 alleged, "repeats itself." Moses discerned clearly that 
 whenever and wherever equality of right in the soil is 
 denied among men, human welfare is rendered im- 
 possible. But he did not, and could not foresee the 
 proper apphcation of the principle in ages then un- 
 born. Accordingly, we must do as he did, adjust 
 theory to existing social surroundings, leaving posterity 
 to do the same. 
 
 Now, were Moses with us to-day — and Heaven 
 knows we are in sore need of a real Grand Old Man at 
 the helm of affairs — how might he be expected to assert, 
 on God's earth, the equality of every man's right of 
 possession ? Terram, autem, dedit filiis hominmn. As 
 nearly as possible, it seems to me, in the language of 
 incomparable old Thomas Spence, of Newcastle-on- 
 Tyne, who took up his parable against our nefarious 
 system of private landlordism as far back as 1775, and 
 propounded a remedy, which he that runneth may read, 
 and reading, understand, unless he be a hereditary land- 
 lord or a born fool. Spence correctly regarded the 
 Parish Council — even yet the child of promise — as the 
 true unit of social organization ; and this is how it was 
 to solve the bottom question of to-day, the Question of 
 the Land. It is a imique imiUutn in parvo. 
 
 THE "LAND QUESTION" IN A NUTSHELL. 
 
 Spence's Plan. 
 
 " Let all the Parishioners unite, take Archdeacon Paley in the 
 one hand and the Bible in the other, assemble in an adjoining 
 field, and, after having discussed the subject to their own satisfac- 
 tion, enter into a Convention and unanimously agree to a Declara- 
 tion of Rights, in which it is declared that all the land, including 
 coalpits, mines, rivers, etc., belonging to the Parish of Bees, now in 
 the possession of Lord Drone, shall, on Lady Da/, 25th March 18 —
 
 40 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 become public property, the joint stock and common farm in which 
 every Parishioner shall enjoy an equal participation. 
 
 " The same Declaration shall serve as a notice to Lord Drone to 
 quit possession, and to give up all right and title to all the land, 
 etc., he has hitherto possessed, to the people of the said Parish of 
 Bees, on or before the above-mentioned day, for ever. 
 
 "And it may be further declared that on Mid-summer Day en- 
 suing, all the rents arising from the lands, mines, rivers, coal pits, 
 etc., belonging to the said parish, instead of being paid as hitherto 
 into the hands of Lord Drore or his Steward, shall be paid into 
 the hands of a Parish Committee or Board of Directors, who may 
 be appointed for that purpose, after being duly elected by a respect- 
 able majority of the whole Parish ; and that, after the national, 
 provincial, and parochial governments are provided for out of the 
 rents thus collected, the remainder maybe divided into equal shares 
 among all the Parishioners — men, women, and children, including 
 Lord and Lady Drone, and all the little Drones belonging to their 
 family— and the like division to be made on every succeeding quarter 
 day for ever." 
 
 What were the Hebrew worker's hours of daily toil ? 
 Were they many ? We cannot tell ; but in the 
 aggregate they must have been surprisingly few. One 
 Bible Cyclopedia authority, who has gone into the 
 matter, calculates that, what with the weekly Sabbath, 
 the Sabbatic Year, the Jubilee Year, the Feasts of 
 Trumpets, Passover, Pentecost, Tabernacles, and 
 minor holidays, the Hebrew " slave " (who fully parti- 
 cipated in them all) must have had nearly half the year 
 to himself! He assisted, moreover, at the national 
 banquets with the rest, and shared with the poor the 
 spontaneous crops of the Sabbatic Year. 
 
 Nor did the Law refuse its protection to the 
 " stranger." Towards him, as to the native poor, com- 
 passion and charity were specifically extended : — 
 
 Thou shalt not oppress a stranger, for ye know the heart of a 
 stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. — Exod. 
 XVIII 9.
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 4X 
 
 No. VIII. 
 
 ••THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS." 
 
 When properly looked at, Interest is seen to be branded with 
 absurdity on the face of it. It is a law of mechanics that we cannot 
 get any more out of a machine than we put into it ; but with this 
 machine called Interest, it is assumed that by putting in a definite 
 quantity at one end we can grind out unlimited returns at the other. 
 Robbery is only possible on condition that there are some who 
 honestly labour. Increase the relative number of those who live 
 upon theft and you decrease in a corresponding ratio the number of 
 those who live by their honest exertions, and whose joint efforts 
 alone make thieving impracticable. This is precisely the case 
 with Interest, yet while the machinery of the law is employed 
 to suppress the one it encourages the other. — A. W. Raymknt. 
 
 Usury (alias Interest) bringeth the treasure of a realm into few 
 hands for the usurer being at certainties and the other at uncer- 
 tadnties, in the end of the game most of the money will be in the 
 box, and ever a State flourisheth when wealth is more equally 
 divided. — Francis Bacon, 
 
 Some persons imagine that Usury obtains only in money, but the 
 Scriptures, forseeing this, have exploded every increase, so that yoB 
 cannot receive more than you gave. — St. Jerome. 
 
 Lend hoping for nothing again. — Jesus Christ. 
 
 The keynote of the Mosaic legislation, it has been seen, 
 was every man his own landlord, or rather, every Man 
 the tenant of the Lord. The land could only be 
 temporarily alienated. In the year of Jubilee it in- 
 evitably reverted to the mortgagor or his offspring. 
 The misfortune or misconduct of the former, could not 
 be visited on the latter. Similarly, the seventh or Sab- 
 batic year cancelled all personal debts, and personal
 
 42 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 service to another was likewise restrained by the year 
 of release (the seventh) and the year of universal 
 emancipation or Jubilee (the fiftieth). By these means 
 the inspired Hebrew Lawgiver did all that foresight 
 could do to prevent his people from at any future time, 
 sinking into poverty, and the servitude which poverty 
 inevitably entails. 
 
 But in nothing was the profound wisdom of Moses' 
 legislation so conspicuous as in his absolute prohibition 
 of Usury or Interest, the most subtle and terrible scourge 
 with which mankind has ever been afflicted. 
 
 If thou lend money to any of my people with thee that is poor, 
 thou shalt not be to him as a creditor, neither shall ye lay upon 
 him usury. 
 
 If thou at all take thy neighbour's garment to pledge, thou shalt 
 restore it unto him by that the sun goeth down. 
 
 For that is his only covering ; it is his garment for his skin ; wherein 
 shall he sleep ? And it shall come to pass when he crieth unto Me 
 that I will hear; for I am gracious. — Exod. xxii., 25, 26, 27. 
 
 When the collective wisdom at St. Stephen's comes 
 to deal with the enormities of our pawn-broking system 
 — and it is surely high time — by which the poor are so 
 unmercifully fleeced, perhaps some spiritual lord in the 
 Upper House will be good enough to preach a short 
 homily to noble lords on the above text. A delicate al- 
 lusion to the inconvenience of having one's lawn sleeves 
 in pawn might point the moral and adorn the tale, albeit 
 they are not an *' only covering." But Moses did not 
 confine his attention to the operations of the humble 
 pawnbroker. He had his eye on the Rothschilds, 
 Vanderbilts, and Jay Goulds. 
 
 Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother, usury of money, 
 usury of victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury. — Dedt. 
 XXIII., 19. 
 
 If thy brother be waxen poor and fallen into decay with thee, 
 then thou shalt relieve him, yea thougVi he be a stranger or a 
 sojourner that he may live with thee. 
 
 Take thou no usury of him or increase, but fear thy God that thy 
 brother may live with thee. 
 
 Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, norland him thy 
 victuals for increase. — Levit., xxv., 35, 36, 37. 
 
 _ Needless to say, the Hebrews in time shamefully 
 violated these Statutes, and do still notoriously violate
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 43 
 
 them ; but heavy indeed has been, and, peradventure, 
 will yet be their punishment. The Continental Europe 
 of to-day is practically owned by their financiers, who 
 proclaim war and make peace as best suits their un- 
 scrupulous avarice. Nor has this nation any exemption 
 from their nefarious machinations. The inexpiable 
 guilt of the Egyptian war must primarily be laid at the 
 door of the Hebrew Usurers, the Rothschilds, Oppen- 
 heims, and Goschens to wit. Our Grand Old Man and 
 his Liberal Cabinet, were but as putty between their 
 dexterous manipulating fingers. 
 
 It is not as Jews but as callous usurers that the 
 Russian Hebrews are now being persecuted. The 
 miserable Muscovite peasant, the most kindly and 
 hospitable creature in the world, is not in the least 
 stirred to intolerance by race-hatred. It is usury- 
 hatred that incites him to the deeds of barbarity so 
 much deplored at the Mansion House. For my own 
 part, though also, but not likewise, deploring the out- 
 rages that have been committed, I must confess that I 
 consider them, if not justifiable, at least perfectly 
 natural, and to be expected in such a poverty-stricken 
 land as Russia. Every country in Mediaeval Christendom 
 bitterly persecuted the Jews for essentially the same 
 reason as they are to-day being harried in the dominions 
 of the Czar. Edward I., " the English Justinian," in 
 1278, hanged 280 of them in the city of London, then, 
 comparatively speaking, a mere village, for the crime of 
 Usury, and when they proved themselves hopelessly 
 incorrigible, expelled the whole fraternity from the 
 realm. The usurper Cromwell, for his own sinister 
 ends, permitted them to return, but they must not 
 imagine that the New Democracy has the same sym- 
 pathy with *' Usury," and ** Increase," as the fleecing 
 middle-class which has since then governed the destinies 
 of this great nation. The honest Hebrew toiler will be 
 cordially received by the British Democracy, when at 
 last it comes into its kingdom, and be treated in every 
 respect as a brother, but the whole tribe of professional 
 Usurers deserve to, and, probably, after due warning,
 
 44 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 will, be visited with expulsion. Their own prophets 
 have duly admonished them of the consequences of 
 such inveterate misconduct. 
 
 Thou hast taken usury and increase, and thon hast greedily 
 gained of thy neighbour by extortion, and hast forgotten Me sayeth 
 the Lord. 
 
 Behold, therefore, I have smitten Mine hand at the dishonest 
 gain which thou hast made. Therefore have I poured out Mine 
 indignation upon them. 
 
 I have consumed them with the fire of my wrath ; their otm 
 way have I recompensed upon their heads, sayeth the Lord. — Ezekibl 
 XXII., 12, 13, 31. 
 
 Nor is there wanting precedent for timely repentance 
 and reformation in Holy Writ. All that is needed is 
 another Nehemiah to convince the most hardened 
 Rothschild or Goschen of transgression. 
 
 Then I consulted with myself, and contended with the nobles 
 and rulers, and said unto them, Ye exact usury, every one of 
 his brother. And I held a great assembly against them. 
 
 And (I said unto them) I likewise, my brethren and my servants 
 do lend them money and corn on usury. I pray you, let us leave 
 off this usury. 
 
 Restore, I pray you, to them, even this day their fields, their 
 vineyards, their olive yards, and their houses ; also the hundredth 
 part of the money, and of the corn, the wine, and the oil, that ye 
 exact of them. 
 
 Thus said they, we will restore them, and will require nothing of 
 them ; so will we do even as thou sayest. 
 
 Then I called the priests and took an oath of them, that they 
 should do according to their promise. 
 
 Also I shook out my lap and said, So shall God shake out every 
 man from his house and from his labour that performeth not this 
 promise 1 even thus be he shaken out and emptied. And all the con- 
 gregation said Amen, and praised the Lord. And the people did 
 according to this promise. Nehemiah v., 7, 10, ii, 12, 13, 14. 
 
 But Nehemiah's short way with usurers though in 
 itself most commendable and instructive, is obviously 
 inapplicable to the complex economic relations of to- 
 day. Since the so-called " Reformation " in the reign 
 of Henry VHI., when Usury first ceased to be a crime 
 in the eye of the law, the evil has grown to such 
 enormous dimensions that we can no more hope to 
 •• shake out " or " empty " it generally, than we can 
 hope to restore the land to the people by re-enacticg 
 
 I
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR» 45 
 
 the Mosaic Jubilee. Were it the Jew alone that we had 
 to deal with, another Nehemiah, or "English Justinian" 
 might well enough be equal to the occasion. But the 
 respectable Christian banker, mortgagee, and dividend- 
 monger is a harder nut to crack. In spite of the explicit 
 injunction of the Master, " Lend, hoping for nothing 
 again," not even the principal, the professed disciples 
 of Christ rival those of Moses in the pursuit of usurious 
 gain. They hope for everything again that can pos- 
 sibly be wrung from the toil of their fellow-men, and 
 they have shamelessly prostituted both religion and 
 economic science to justify their insatiable avarice. But 
 they have been found out, and the time will come when 
 usurer and landlord — they are twin brethren — will be 
 overwhelmed in a common condemnation. Money-rent 
 (Usury) will some day be as intelligible and as execrated 
 by the ** masses " as land-rent and house-rent. Did 
 I say they were twin brothers ? Nay, they are related 
 as father and son, and the latter cannot long survive 
 the former. Replying to Aristotle's famous argument 
 against usury, that it must be regarded as sordid and 
 unjustifiable, inasmuch as money put aside cannot pro- 
 duce money, John Calvin thus lucidly traced the iniquity 
 to its source, and I beg every reader to weigh well his 
 words : 
 
 " It is undoubted that money does not produce 
 money ; but with money land is bought, which produces 
 more than the returns for the labour applied to it, and 
 which gives a surplus income to the proprietor, after 
 all expenses of wages and other things have been met. 
 With money a house can be bought bringing a rent 
 income. 
 
 Objects with which things can be bought, pro- 
 ducing INCOMES BY THEMSELVES, CAN CERTAINLY BE 
 CONSIDERED AS BRINGING INCOMES BY THEMSELVES." 
 
 Such, then, is the simple solution of the mystery of 
 the origin of Usury which has befogged the intellect 
 of nearly every expounder of the " dismal science " from 
 the author of the *' Wealth of Nations " down to the 
 " Prophet of San Francisco."
 
 46 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 And now for the remedy. It will be found in 
 " Spence's Plan " of Land Restoration laid before the 
 reader in the last chapter. Calvin, it is noteworthy, places 
 house-rent and land-rent in the same category as things, 
 purchaseable with money, that produce incomes by 
 themselves. To stifle the Usury-fiend, therefore, we 
 must not merely abolish private property in the soil, 
 but in everything that adheres to it, be it house, railway, mine, 
 factory, or workshop. With collective ownership of 
 all these monopolies every door will be closed in the 
 face of the usurer. His vast *' interest " will sink to 
 zero or below it. " Profitable investments " will be at 
 an end, and the Jay Goulds, great and small, cease from 
 troubling. The Amazons and Missisippis of usury 
 will be lost in the ocean of wages. For the first time 
 in the history of mankind, the slave of toil will be (he 
 master of the situation.
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THb. POOI* 47 
 
 No. IX. 
 
 THE USURER— ECRASEZ L'INFAME. 
 
 Some persons imagine that Usury obtains only in money, but the 
 Scriptures, forseeing this, have exploded every increase, so that you 
 cannot receive more than you gave. — St. Jerome. 
 
 The heathen was able by the light of reason to conclude that a 
 Usurer is a double dyed thief and murderer. We Christians, how- 
 ever, hold him in such honour that we fairly worship him for the 
 sake of his money. Whoever eats up, robs and steals the nourish- 
 ment of another, commits as great a murder as far as in him lies, as 
 he who starves a man or utterly undoes him. Such does a Usurer, 
 and sits the while safe on his stove when he ought to be rather 
 hanging from the gallows. Little thieves are put in the stocks. 
 Great thieves go flaunting in gold and silk. Therefore is there on 
 this earth no greater enemy of man, after the devil, than agripe-n>oney 
 and Usurer. — Martin Luther. 
 
 Usury has always caused the ruin 'of States where it has been 
 tolerated, and it was this disorder which contributed very much to 
 subvert the Constitution of the Roman Commonwealth, and to give 
 birth to the greatest calamities in all the provinces. — Rollin 
 " Ancient History." 
 
 Among economists, Henry George may to day be 
 regarded as the prime defender of Usury. The 
 author of " Progress and Poverty *' is a good and able 
 man, and the New Democracy owes him much, but I 
 have never been able to fathom his attitude on this 
 momentous issue. One ot his very best compositions 
 is a pamphlet on " Moses " as a legislator; and, strange 
 to say, he is entirely silent on the great Hebrew 
 Lawgiver's explicit anti-Usury enactments ! '* Hamlet," 
 with the Prince of Denmark left out, were a trifle to 
 that.
 
 48 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 After a convincing refutation of the defensive grounds 
 taken up by other pro-Usury economists, he proceeds 
 to define his own position, which is in brief this : — " It 
 is true," he says, " that money will not increase if put 
 away. It only claims interest, because it can be ex- 
 changed with other kinds of wealth which claim interesti 
 as for instance wine, which improves in quality, and 
 bees, sheep, hogs, and cattle which increase in 
 number." &c. 
 
 Let us consider the wine illustration. According to 
 the taste of the great majority of wine-drinkers, wines, 
 if well looked after, do undoubtedly improve up to a 
 certain date. After that they deteriorate and turn to 
 vinegar. Now suppose the wine is sold in due season, 
 is there any increase of value beyond that which pays 
 for the rent of the cellar, the labour of bottling, the risk 
 of breakage, fire and thieves ? Yes, there is added the 
 Usury which the capitalist! might in the interval have 
 had by investing in land or other related monopoly, 
 condemned by Henry George. Instead of a cause we 
 have only an effect, and so it is with all his other illus- 
 trations. Herr Flurscheim, in his masterly but some- 
 what involved work, ** Rent, Interest, and Wages," 
 thus lucidly refutes the Prophet of San Francisco " :— 
 
 " If I have ;^ioo worth of goods of any description, 
 with which I can purchase a piece of land, bringing £^ 
 worth of rental income, I should certainly be a fool if I 
 lent this ;^ioo in money or goods of any kind to any- 
 body unless he paid me at least £'^ a year for the privi- 
 lege of getting the use of my capital during that time. 
 
 '•Here we have in a few words the answer to the 
 question where the real origin of Interest is to be found. 
 Not because old wine has by natural causes obtained 
 an increase of value beyond that added by labour, 
 storage, rent, etc., do we obtain the higher price, but 
 because the same capital invested in land purchase 
 would have brought a certain rent. When, instead 
 of purchasing land with his money, our wine merchant 
 bought new wine with it, hi had to add to thfi cost of his 
 wine the rent he sacrificed*^
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE FOOR. 49 
 
 But land, though the original source of incomes 
 obtained without work, is not the only one. All railway, 
 canal, gas, water, bank, insurance, and such like 
 "securities" are sinks of Usury in which the poor ar^; 
 helplessly engulfed. Some short time ago, it will be re- 
 membered, a single, " share " in the London New River 
 Water Company was sold, for ^95,000. The correspond- 
 ing value of the reservoirs, tubes, etc., could not exceed, 
 say, ;^i 0,000. That was the ym/ capital. The remaining 
 ;^85,ooo was the spurious capital, consisting of the 
 monstrous water-rate tribute, which the purchaser 
 bought the privilege of extorting from a given popula- 
 tion of unresisting victims for a prime necessary of 
 life. 
 
 But, outside the land monopoly, the most infamous 
 source of usury is unquestionably the so-called 
 "National Debt." There the whole of the capital is 
 absolutely spurious. The real capital consisted of the 
 gunpowder and the lead which " Sovereigns and 
 Statesmen " expended so liberally about a century ago 
 in attempting to murder Liberty on the Continents of 
 Europe and America. Our War-Debt is the most 
 stupendous monument of human crime and folly in 
 existence ; and worst of all, the " butcher's bill " has 
 already been paid by the unhappy toilers thrice over in 
 Usury. 
 
 We hear a great deal about the " Funds," and are 
 apt to beheve that it must be a place where national 
 treasure is kept ; but the " Funds " are nowhere except 
 in the workers' pockets, out of which the Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer contrives annually to fish them to the 
 tune of ;^26,ooo,ooo for the behoof of the " Classes." 
 When this pretended debt was contracted, the country 
 w,as in the remorseless grasp of the most unscrupulous 
 oligarchy known. Out of 658 members of the House 
 of Commons 306 were returned by 159 persons, mostly 
 peers! And yet the unhappy" Masses" are to be 
 mulcted eternally by reason of the crimes of a hand- 
 ful of defunct miscreants, who can by no stretch of 
 imagination be regarded as related to them, even by
 
 50 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 ties of ancestry ! Whatever are Burns and Hardie 
 about that they do not move the immediate repudiation 
 of this outrageous and most C7;mational Debt ? 
 
 Such, however, is Usury, and it is with this crying 
 iniquity that the " Classes" have cunningly contrived 
 to enmesh the provident toilers by the wicked device 
 of Post Office and Trustee Savings Banks. 
 
 And now, in case some of my toiling readers may 
 not be convinced that they ought, on no account, to 
 participate with the "Classes" in usurious investments, 
 let me reproduce the following narrative from Hosmer's 
 "The Jews" (Story of the Nations Series), the moral 
 of which is that " he should have a long spoon who 
 sups with the devil," a Rothschild, or other professional 
 trafficker in " the accursed thing." — 
 
 " On the memorable iSth of June, 1815, the sharp eyes 
 of Nathan Rothschild watched the fortunes of Waterloo 
 as eagerly as those of Napoleon or Wellington. He got 
 into some shot-proof nook near Hugomont, whence he 
 peered over the field, saw the charge before which Picton 
 fell, the counter-charge of the Inniskilleners and Scots 
 Greys, the immolation of the French Cuirassiers, the 
 seizure of La Haye Sainte at the English centre, the 
 gradual gathering of the Prussians, and at last the 
 catastrophe, as the sunset light threw the shadow of the 
 poplars on the Nivelles-road across the awful wreck, 
 and the ' sauve qui pent ' of the panic-stricken wretches 
 arose, who fled in the dusk before the implacable sabres 
 of Blucher. 
 
 When the decision came, the alert observer cried 
 exultingly; 'The house of Rothschild has won this 
 battle ! ' Then, mounting a swift horse, which all 
 day had stood saddled and bridled, he rode through the 
 short June night at a gallop, reaching, with daybreak, 
 the shore of the German ocean. The waters were tossing 
 stormily, and no vessel would venture forth. The eager 
 Jew, hurrying restlessly along the shore, found a bold 
 fisherman at last, who, for a great bribe, was induced to 
 risk his craft and himself. In the cockleshell, drenched 
 and in danger of foundering, but driving forward, the
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 5I 
 
 English coast was at length gained, and immediately 
 after, through whip and spur, London. 
 
 " It was early morning of June 20th when he dropped 
 upon the capital, as if borne thither upon the enchanted 
 mantle of the Arabian Nights. Only gloomy rumours, 
 so far, had reached the British world. The hearts of 
 men were depressed and stocks had sunk to the lowest. 
 No hint of the truth fell from the lips of the travel- worn 
 but viligant banker, so suddenly at his post in St. 
 Swithin's-lane. Simply, he was ready to buy Consols as 
 others were to sell. With due calculation, all appearance 
 of suspicious eagerness was avoided. He moved among 
 the bankers and brokers, shaking his head lugubriously. 
 'It is a sad state of affairs,* his forlorn face seemed to 
 say ; ' what hope is there for England ? ' And so his 
 head went on shaking solemnly, and those who met 
 him felt confirmed in their impression that England 
 had gone by the board and that it was, perhaps, best 
 to get away in time before the French advanced guard 
 took possession of the city. But he bought Consols, 
 for some unaccountable reason, and his agents were in 
 secret everywhere, ready to buy, though a panic seemed 
 to be impending. So passed June 20th — so passed June 
 2ist. On the evening of that day the Exchange closed, 
 and the chests of Nathan Meyer were crammed with 
 paper. 
 
 An hour later came galloping into the City the 
 Government courier, with the first clear news of victory. 
 London flashed into bonfires and illuminations. The 
 Exchange opened next day with everything advanced 
 to fabulous prices. In the south corner, under a pillar 
 which was known as his place, leaned the operator so 
 matchless in swiftness and audacity. His face was 
 pale, his eye somewhat jaded ; but his head, for some 
 reason, had lost its unsteadiness. His face, too, had 
 lost i ts lugubriousness, but had a dreamy, happy ex- 
 pression, as if he beheld some beatific vision. The little 
 gentleman had made ten millions of dollars.' 
 
 "Had made" (!) had stolen, by a well-acted lie, 
 ;^2, 000,000 from the bank of human misery. Was he
 
 52 Tim GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 punished for the fraud ? Not a bit. He was honoured 
 as "a good business man," and "Hved happily ever 
 afterwards." His descendants are in the peerage, and 
 flourish everywhere like green bay trees ; and there is 
 probably not a speculator on the Stock Exchange to-day 
 who would not applaud the transaction, and exclaim : 
 " Well done, thou good and faithful servant ! " 
 
 And, worse and worse, out of the vast legion of 
 mercenary *' clergy of all dominations," I doubt if there 
 could be found half a dozen who would venture to 
 address their congregations in the language of old Arch- 
 bishop Sands : 
 
 " This canker (Usury) hath corrupted all England. 
 It has become the chief chaffer and merchandise of 
 England. We shall do God and our country good 
 service by taking away this evil. Repress it by law, 
 else the heavy hand of God hangeth over us and ^"ill 
 Strike us."
 
 THE GObPEL OF THE POOR. 53 
 
 No. X. 
 
 THE USURER A3 INSURER. 
 
 It is undoubted that money does not produce money ; but with 
 money land is bought, which produces more than the returns foi 
 the labour applied to it, and which gives a surplus income to the pro- 
 prietor, after all expenses of wages and other things have been met. 
 With money a house can be bought bringing a rent income. Objects 
 with which things can be bought, producing incomes by themselves, 
 can certainly be considered as bringing incomes by themselves. — ■ 
 
 John Calvin. 
 
 As the sole landowner, the sole proprietor of the fountain of all 
 material existence — the possession of which entails the right of 
 levying a tribute from all the inhabitants equivalent to all their 
 earnings beyond their legitimate wages, and even more if found 
 necessary — the State with such a power would always have been 
 the greatest capitalist in the land, so far exceeding all others in the 
 magnitude of her wealth, that instead of ever having to borrow, she 
 would have become the principal lender. She would have been en- 
 abled to build the railroads and canals from her own capital, and so 
 gas and water works, etc., would have been built by the community. 
 
 — Michael Flurscheim. 
 
 In the last section we left Nathan Meyer Rothschild 
 gloating over the ;^2, 000,000 he "made" out of the 
 carnage of Waterloo. Not all the vultures that hovered 
 over that stricken field combined, were actuated by so fell 
 a purpose as Nathan. They could but rend the bodies 
 of the slain who were at rest ; Nathan took measures 
 to spoil and enslave unborn generations of his fellow 
 men. 
 
 To what use did he put his plun der ? Did he spend 
 it in the purchase of articles of consumption? No. 
 Did he buy new tools of production with it? No, 
 Did he simply hoard it ? No.
 
 54 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 Had he done any one of these things the workers 
 would not have been enthralled by him in their present 
 house of bondage. Nathan knew better. He " in- 
 vested " his plunder in such a way as to give it per- 
 petuity, nay, unlimited fecundity. He made it the safe 
 basis of innumerable future robberies. He proceeded 
 to "operate" on the Stock Exchange, which is but 
 another name for what, in less pharisaic days, would 
 have been called the slave market. 
 
 " Stocks," when analysed, in nine cases out of ten, 
 simply mean the right to squeeze tribute out of workers who 
 are nominally *' free." By far the greatest part of what 
 is set down as national *' Capital " is merely slave flesh- 
 and-blood. If all monopolies, including the father of 
 them all, private land-ownership, were to be abolished 
 to-morrow, Mr.GifFen'spompous tables of national wealth 
 would assume very modest dimensions. With the 
 usurers' tribute-rights over the toilers swept clean away, 
 we should have nothing left but the real capital of the 
 community, viz., the roads, canals, railways, embank- 
 ments, drainage and irrigation works, etc., the whole 
 of which we owe to human industry past and present, 
 with the precious and powerful aid of science and 
 art. 
 
 It is the peculiarity of the millionaire — Rothschild or 
 any other — that he always deals by preference in 
 assured tribute-rights which he knows he will have the 
 whole power of the State to enable him to extort from 
 the toilers. In France alone — peasant-proprietary 
 France — the Rothschilds own 800,000 acres. The 
 Austrian Rothschild owns, in Bohemia chiefly, more 
 land. Government bonds, mortgages, mines, oil wells, 
 etc., than the Emperor. Such " investments " give no 
 employment to anybody. They consist of transferred 
 tribute- rights. The "property" is property in slaves. 
 
 An analysis of the " fortune " of J. D. Rockefeller, the 
 American millionaire, made in 1890, showed that out of 
 117 million dollars which the good man was "worth," 
 100 millions, at least, consisted of capitalised tribute-rights- 
 Standard Oil Company Shares, railway monopolies, gas
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 55 
 
 monopolies, and the like, every dollar of which was 
 false, fictitious, and spurious capital. 
 
 In the American Republic the Usurer has done his 
 fell work even more efficiently than here, and in the 
 best instructed circles there is nothing but a fearful 
 foreboding of social catastrophe. 
 
 Mr. Thomas G. Shearman of New York, an eminent 
 lawyer and statistician, makes the following calcula* 
 tion : There are in the United States to-day — 
 70 men possessing more than 37,500,000 dols^ 
 90 „ „ ,, ,, 11,500,000 ,, 
 
 180 „ ,, ,, ,, 8,000,000 ,, 
 
 135 „ ,, ,, ,, 6,800,000 ,, 
 
 1,755 »> „ n M 2,300,000 ,, 
 
 6,000 ,, „ ,, ,, _ 1,250,000 ,, 
 
 The wealth of the Republic is estimated at 
 65,000,000,000 dollars, and one half of this grand total is 
 owned by 35,000 individuals out of a population of 
 65,000,000. Fifty years ago there was but one millionaire 
 in the United States ; but then beggars, tramps, and 
 " unemployed " were equally scarce. Slavery is far more 
 rampant in America now than it was in ante bellum days, 
 and, with singular foresight, Abraham Lincoln, when 
 he emancipated the blacks, predicted that such would 
 be the case. He saw that the dire monetary necessities 
 of the Government had, for the first time, delivered the 
 Republic over to the money-power, helplessly bound 
 hand and foot ; and he groaned in spirit to think of the 
 inevitable misery which the Usurers' yoke would im- 
 pose on his country. 
 
 But there, as here, there is a shaking of the dry bones 
 of democracy, and a more and more settled conviction 
 that, outside Collectivism, pure and simple, and the con- 
 sequent extinction of all tnbute-rights, the usurer must 
 remain the master of the situation, and the unhappy 
 worker be bought and sold by him on every Stock Ex- 
 change in the world. 
 
 I have dwelt longer on this Usury question than I had 
 intended : but it is so vital, and the effects of its subtle 
 poison on the body social are so imperfectly understood,
 
 55 Tllli GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 that almost no amount of iteration is without justifi- 
 cation. I shall now conclude, however, with a fcAV 
 words regarding the Usurer as Insurer. 
 
 The Insurance Office is, next to the Bank proper, the 
 greatest and most dangerous of the usury dens. 
 Especially so are all those Life Offices in which the 
 workers are prone to take out policies. But let us look 
 at the ways of the very best of them, those that are 
 never tired of flaunting in our faces their enormous 
 Reserve Funds, Bonuses, &c. 
 
 Under the present system of life insurance a person 
 aged thirty, who *' lives out his expectancy," will have 
 paid (at existing rates and including 4 per cent, com- 
 pound interest) nearly ;i<f2, 000 for a life policy of ;^i,ooo. 
 He may at times get what is called a "bonus" added to 
 his ** claim," but that is only a portion of the excessive 
 premium he has been charged. It is a sort of office 
 " conscience money," for which the insured owes the 
 same sort of gratitude as the traveller owes to the 
 robber who strips him of his clothes, but considerately 
 leaves him his shirt. 
 
 When a man insures his life he makes a sort of ghastly 
 bet that he will die prematurely, and so cheat the 
 insurance office. The office, on the other hand, bets 
 that the insured's days will be long in the land ; and 
 that, in old age, or in consequence of misfortune or 
 improvidence, he will no longer be able to keep up his 
 premium-payments. The insured has but one chance 
 against the office's two, and the second of these is a 
 factor regarding which he is entirely in the dark. 
 
 The adult death-rate per thousand every office is 
 careful to set forth. It does not exceed thirteen or 
 fourteen per thousand per annum. But what of the 
 percentage and the aggregate amount per annum of 
 policies forfeited by reason of supervening poverty on 
 the part of holders ? Docs any office divulge that little 
 secret ? I trow not. If it did it might as well put up 
 its shutters. Nevertheless, we have it on the authority 
 of the Institute ot Actuaries, that in a given term, 
 " claims " were to " lapses " as 72,162 to 176,330 !
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 57 
 
 In i8gi the Mutual Life of New York rejoiced in 
 14,645 " lapses " against 3,462 " claims " ; while another 
 American Office did even better, "scooping" 18,637 
 "lapses" to 3,931 "claims." 
 
 I am, of course, an advocate of a complete system of 
 Old Age State Pensions; but, assuming that life insurance 
 is commendable, what about the monstrous Premium 
 Rate that prevails ? If the Death-rate is 13 or 14 per 
 thousand, Death Claims (exclusive of the cost of 
 management) ought clearly to be met by annual 
 premiums of ;^i3 or ;^i4 per ;^iooo. Yet the Average 
 Premium Rate of British Life Offices is from £^0 to £\o pev 
 amium. 
 
 What is the result ? In 1890-91 the twenty leading 
 British offices paid in Death and Endowment Claims 
 ^^6,155, 388, and received in Premiums and Interest 
 ;^i 1,535,686, or nearly twice their disbursements! The 
 surplus of Premiums and Interest over Claims was 
 ;^5.58o,298! 
 
 The British Life Offices have now accumulated out 
 of surplus premiums and interest the stupendous sum of 
 ^216,500,000, and are, without exception, unredeemed 
 sinks of Usury. Their vaunted Reserves, their hand- 
 some Dividends, and their palatial mansions have all 
 been coined out of the sweat and tears of toil. In the 
 United Kingdom alone they have ^93,000,000 out on 
 mortgage ! 
 
 What chance has the widow or orphan against the 
 Men of Belial, who have set up these high places of 
 Insurance in the land ? Truly does " he require a long 
 spoon who would sup with the devil " of Usury.
 
 58 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 No. XI. 
 
 ••THE L.\W AND THE PROPHETS." 
 
 Thou hast embarked, thou has made the voyage ; thou hast coitte 
 to the shore ; get out. If, indeed, unto another Hfe, there is even 
 then no want of Gods ; but, if unto a state devoid of sensation, thou 
 wilt cease to be held of pains and pleasures. — Marcus Aurelius. 
 
 Come now, therefore, remove this fear of death, and bring as 
 many thunders and lightnings as thou wilt, and thou shalt soon per- 
 ceive how great tranquility and calm are in that reason which is 
 the ruling faculty of the soul. Thou must be absolute. Thou must 
 be absolutely resigned to the will of God. Thou must conquer 
 every passion, abrogate every desire. — Seneca. 
 
 The days of the nations bear no trace 
 
 Of all the sunshine so far foretold ; 
 The cannon speaks in the teacher's place— 
 
 The age is weary with work and gold. 
 And high hopes wither and memories wane ; 
 
 On hearths and altars the fires are dead ; 
 But that brave faith hath not lived in vain 
 
 And that was all that our watcher said. 
 
 I have now dealt with the main features of the Mosaic 
 Legislation from the economic point of view. It insti- 
 tuted a system of rigorously restricted IndividuaUsm. 
 It strove to strangle the rent-fiend by making every 
 Hebrew his own landlord. It prohibited interest or 
 "usury," and anathematised projit or "extortion." It 
 made generous provision for the "poor," the " stranger," 
 and the "sojourner." The " servant " or Avorker had 
 nearly half the year to himself in Sabbaths, Sabbatic 
 years. Jubilees, etc. The very ox was not to be muzzled 
 while treading out the corn.
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 59 
 
 Moses, it is clear, recognised the difficulty perhaps 
 even the certain impossibility, of raising a structure of 
 complete social equality and justice on an Individual- 
 istic foundation ; but every other was then out of the 
 question. At any rate, he did his best to impose all 
 manner of checks on the evils that inevitably flow from 
 the Individualist principle. He tried to secure for his 
 people the benefits of Collectivism under the forms of 
 Individualism, and for that purpose sounder rules could 
 not have been laid down. They are for their time a 
 miracle of wisdom and humanity, and, indeed, would 
 be a vast improvement on any laws affecting the econ- 
 omic welfare of the " masses " on our own statute book 
 to-day. 
 
 Our Social system is, alas ! also Individualistic, but 
 Avithout any of the prudent restraints and limitations 
 imposed by Moses on private greed, The laws fabri- 
 cated at Westminster intensify, and are meant to in- 
 tensify, every evil which the Hebrew Lawgiver strove 
 to repress or nullify. The land is " sold in perpetuity." 
 Usury is encouraged, not forbidden. Profit or inequit- 
 able exchange is blessed, not cursed. •' The Rich Man's 
 Club at St. Stephen's " is merely a committee of Pluto- 
 crats — rentmongers, interestmongers and profitmongers 
 — assembled for the purpose of safeguarding the spoils 
 which the "classes" have theftuously contrived to 
 heap up. 
 
 And the despoiled " masses " look on like men dazed 
 or indifferent. Nay, they even vote for the ** six hundred 
 and odd scoundrels," as O'Connell, in a moment of 
 extraordinary veracity once called the " faithful Com- 
 mons," and thus actively assist in rivetting the fetters 
 of their own servitude. 
 
 Or worse even, were that possible, to keep their 
 fleecers in secure possession of their ill-gotten gains, 
 our Tommy Atkmses are ever ready, at any moment, 
 to silence possible discontent among their mates not in 
 scarlet and buttons, by the invincible argument of the 
 Gatling gun. 
 
 Nor is the toiler in blue far behind the toiler in red
 
 60 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 in his zeal to protect the " rights of property " (of which 
 he has none, or none worth mentioning), as witness for 
 us " Robert's" memorable feats in Trafalgar-square on 
 •' Bloody Sunday." If Pharoah had been cute enough to 
 recruit his army and police force from the ranks of 
 Hebrew toil, Moses, you may be sure, would have found 
 the task of leading the Israelites out of the house of 
 bondage one of immensely increased difficulty. 
 
 Paley, albeit an Archdeacon, understood the mechan- 
 ism of modern British society perfectly. Here is a pic- 
 ture he draws, and it is not flattering either to the in- 
 telligence or the manhood of the nation : — 
 
 " If you should see a flock of pigeons in a field of 
 corn, and if (instead of each picking where and what it 
 liked, taking just as much as it wanted and no more) 
 you should see ninety-nine of them gathering all they 
 got into a heap ; reserving nothing for themselves but 
 chaff and refuse ; keeping this heap for one, and that 
 the weakest, perhaps worst, pigeon of the flock ; sitting 
 round and looking on all the winter, whilst this one was 
 devouring, throwing about, wasting it ; and if a pigeon 
 more hardy or hungry than the rest, touched a grain of 
 the hoard, all the others instantly flying upon it and 
 tearing it to pieces ; if you should see this, you would 
 see nothing more than what is every day practised and 
 established among men. 
 
 Among men you see the ninety-and-nine toiling and 
 scraping together a heap of superfluities for one (and 
 this one too, oftentimes the feeblest and worst of the 
 whole set, a child, a woman, a madman, or a fool) ; 
 getting nothing for themselves all the while, but a little 
 of the coarsest of the provision which their own industry 
 produces ; looking quietly on, while they see the fruit 
 of all their labour spent or spoiled ; and if one of the 
 number take or touch a particle of the hoard, the others 
 joining against him and hanging him for the theft." 
 
 One reason — and it is, perhaps, the chief — why the 
 British toilers have come to act with such irrational 
 servility, is the persistency with which the *' clergy of all 
 denominations " have taught that the life here is nothing,
 
 Till! GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 6l 
 
 and the life hereafter everything. Had Moses started 
 in the " sky pilot " line of business, he would assuredly 
 never have piloted the Israelites through the Red Sea 
 and across the arid Desert beyond. It was not " man- 
 sions in the sky," but " a land flowing with milk and 
 honey," that he promised to the Children of the Exodus. 
 Unlike the clerical tribe, who so frequently ignorantly 
 appeal to Iiis authority : 
 
 " He preached no future worlds of pain or bliss 
 To cheat the weak and rob the poor in this." 
 
 Jehovah was a present God — I AM, not I WILL BE. 
 On the immortality of the soul Moses was simply silent. 
 He was in no way afflicted by the " Selfishness of Sal- 
 vation," the spiritual malady from which so many good 
 Catholics, Protestants, Buddists, and Theosophists 
 suffer so grievously. Of the life beyond the grave the 
 Hebrew Law-giver would probably have said with 
 the Roman Stoic, *' that is Jupiter's affair not mine." 
 But that he should have entirely ignored the subject is 
 beyond measure singular, especially when we considei 
 that he was " learned in all the learning of the Egyp- 
 tians." 
 
 Of what that learning essentially consisted it is im- 
 possible to say, as its depositaries, the priests, de- 
 liberately taught two doctrines, an exoteric for the 
 uninitiated vulgar, and an estoric for the aristocracy 
 of intellect. To the inquisitive thinkers of Greece, 
 they contemptuously said, ** Ye are children," and, like 
 Mrs. Besant, kept their occultism to themselves on the 
 plea that the mere Huxleys or Tyndalls of " material 
 plane " science might injure themselves or others by 
 improper applications. 
 
 It is not improbable that Moses was an honest 
 democratic " Mahatma," who, in his Code, fearlessly 
 embodied the secret Monotheistic doctrine taught only 
 to the select few by the juggling priests of Ra Ptah, 
 Hesiri Hes, and the awful Ma-t. 
 
 In like manner it is quite credible that Moses was 
 taught by these occultists to regard with contemp ■ 
 everything enjoined in their gruesome " Book of the
 
 62 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR, 
 
 Dead ; " that both sarcophagus and mummy availed 
 the departed nothing ; and that the awesome Silent 
 Judgment Hall of the Two Truths was but a cunning 
 fiction, designed, as Burns said, was '• the fear o' hell," 
 merely as a " hangman's whip to keep the wretch in 
 order." 
 
 But over exoteric, uninitiated Egypt, the doctrine of 
 the immortality of the soul exercised a most degrading 
 and pernicious influence, as it has always done, and 
 always will do, if left to professional priests and pre- 
 rogatived rulers to manipulate. The Egyptian's 
 greatest passion in life came to be the preservation of 
 his body after death. Duty to the living was forgotten 
 in care of the dead. Moses apprehended the full extent 
 of the evil, and took effectual precautions against any 
 outburst of mortuary idolatry in his own case. The 
 magnanimous leader died unattended and in solitude. 
 
 So Moses, the Servant of the Lord, died there in the land of 
 Moab, according to the word of the Lord. 
 
 And he buried him [or he was buried] over against Bethpeor, but 
 no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day. — Dkut. xxxiv., 5, 6. 
 
 This protest against otherworldliness in its crudest form, 
 on the part of Moses, is all the more significant when 
 it is recollected that the Hebrews were even then 
 carrying back to ancestral soil the bones of Joseph, who 
 had been dead for several centuries. 
 
 But if Moses neither affirmed nor denied the im- 
 mortality of the soul, it is certain that later teachers did 
 not remain neutral on the subject. They confidently 
 denied, and it was not until a period of the greatest 
 national suflering and degradation was reached, that 
 the idea of a life of after-death compensations took 
 serious hold of the Hebrew mind. Even in the time of 
 Christ, the respectable, conservative Sadducee remained 
 incredulous. 
 
 But that Christ clearly but cautiously announced to 
 man his immortality there can be no doubt. He did 
 not, however, like St. Paul, with his somewhat lame 
 logic, argue a question which is in its nature unarguable. 
 He simply revealed this transcendant truth in the words: 
 
 1 
 
 i
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 63 
 
 " I am the Resurrection and the Life." With similar 
 directness He said to the thief on the cross: "This 
 night shalt thou be with Me in Paradise." {Hac nocte 
 mectim in Paradiso esto.) But He vouchsafed no details 
 beyond the very general assurance that "in My Father's 
 house there are many mansions." And there can be 
 no doubt that, when we consider the vile purposes to 
 which designing men in confessional, inquisition, and 
 pulpit have put His assurance of immortality, He dis- 
 closed quite as much as was good for mankind. What- 
 ever directly, or indirectly, tends to compete with the 
 ideal Kingdom of God on Earth does not assuredly 
 qualify for celestial mansions. 
 
 It is not difficult to apprehend why so many of the 
 old Hebrew writers combated the notion of personal 
 immortality. It was not the individual Hebrew, but 
 the Hebrew nation, that was the object of Jehovah's 
 care. It was Israel that was immortal. It was only 
 as component members of the entire community that 
 individual Israelites could come into relations with 
 their Deity, and I AM was peculiarly the God of 
 the living. At death the weak and pithless shade 
 enters the realm of Sheol, where oblivion reigns 
 supreme : — 
 
 For to him that is joined with all the living there is hope; for a 
 living dog is better than a dead lion. 
 
 For the living know that they shall die ; but the dead know not 
 anything, neither have they any more a reward ; for the memory 
 of them is forgotten. 
 
 As well their love, as their hatred, and their envy is now perished ; 
 neither have they any more a portion for ever in anything that 
 is done under the sun. — Ecclesiastes ix , 4, 5, 6. 
 
 There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary be 
 at rest. 
 
 There the prisoners are at ease together; they hear not the 
 voice of the taskmaster. 
 
 The small and great are there ; and the servant is free from his 
 master. — Job hi., 17, 18 ig. 
 
 Even the remembrance of God Himself is blotted 
 out : — 
 
 For in death there is no remembrance of Thee ; in Sheol who 
 shall give Thee thanks ? — Psalms vi., 5.
 
 64 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 For the grave cannot praise Thee, death cannot celebrate Thee. 
 They that go down to the pit cannot hope for Thy truth. — Isaiah 
 XXXVIII., iS. 
 
 Eat these melancholy passages, and others even 
 more convincing that might be cited, though they ex- 
 plicitly deny immortality to man, none the less imply 
 that the desin for it was in the hearts of the writers. 
 And it was this vague and hopeless longing that Christ, 
 who came to fulfil, and not destroy the Law and the 
 Prophets, satisfied when he declared : •' I am the 
 Resurrection and the Life."
 
 HIE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 65 
 
 No. XII. 
 
 "THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS." 
 
 Whence thinkest thou Kings and parasites arose ? 
 
 Whence that unnatural line of drones, who heap 
 
 Toil and unvanquishable penury 
 
 On those who build their palaces and bring 
 
 Their daily bread ? From vice — black, loathsome vice— 
 
 From rapine, madness, treachery and wrong ; 
 
 From all that genders misery, and makes 
 
 Of earth this thorny wilderness ; Irom lust 
 
 Revenge and murder. — Shelley. 
 
 And as at first the Conqueror did by violence and force deny that 
 freedom to the people which was their natural right and privilege, 
 so he and his successors all along lay as bars and impediments to 
 the true national interests and public good, in the very national 
 councils and assemblies themselves, which were constituted in such 
 a manner as most served for the upholding of the private interest 
 of their famihes. — Sir Harry Vane. 
 
 O thou that sea-walls sever 
 From lands unwalled by seas I 
 Wilt thou endure for ever, 
 O Milton's England these ? 
 Thou that wast his Republic, 
 Wilt thou clasp their knees ? 
 These royalties rust-eaten, 
 These worm-corroded lies 
 That keep thy head storm-beaten, 
 And sun-like strength of eyes 
 From the open air and heaven 
 Of intercepted skies I — Swinburne. 
 
 The economic sections of the Mosaic Constitution 
 having been discussed, it remains to speak briefly of 
 lliose juucly political. What was the foivd of govern-
 
 66 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 ment which found favour in the sight of Jehovah ? A 
 Republic, Federal and Democratic. 
 
 In the Hebrew Republic or United Tribes of 
 Israel the principle of local autonomy was carried to 
 the utmost limit. There was no bond between the 
 Twelve Tribes or Commonwealths during the period of 
 the RepubUc, except that dependent on the common 
 worship of Jehovah and the observance of His written 
 Law. Moses, it is true, was assisted by a Senate or 
 Council of Seventy Elders, and it is possible that at 
 the great religious festivals, which were virtually " con- 
 gregations" or parliaments of the nation, the authority 
 of some such body was generally recognised, as was 
 certainly the Sanhedrim after the Babylonish Captivity. 
 But as the abomination of a standing army was not 
 permitted, its authority, like that of the Judges or Pre- 
 sidents that from time to time ** arose " to ward off 
 foreign aggression, must have been chiefly of the moral 
 order. 
 
 If one of the States were assailed, the fighting men 
 or militia of the others were in duty bound to arm in its 
 defence. Beyond this, and payment of a national tax 
 of two-tenths for the support of the Levites or literary 
 class and provision for the public sacrifices and ban- 
 quets, there was no inter-State obligation. 
 
 The compiler of the Book of Judges, though incor- 
 porating in his text historic matter of high authority, 
 did not live till the sixth century before Christ, and his 
 narrative leaves out many details aflfecting the adminis- 
 tration of the Republican State, which it would have 
 been of interest for us to learn. But the aim of the 
 Republic was peace, not war, and history, as we know, 
 chiefly concerns itself with the crimes of " Sovereigns 
 and Statesmen." When every deduction is made, 
 however, for intermittent sufferings under a foreign 
 yoke, nearly three centuries of uneventful national 
 happiness must be set down to the credit of the Federal 
 Republic, and Dean Milman, now esteemed a some- 
 what belated authority, is justified in holding ; ♦' If the 
 Hebrew nation did not enjoy a high degree of intel- 
 
 i
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 67 
 
 2ectual civilization, yet, as simple husbaudmen, 
 possessing perfect freedom, equal laws, the regular 
 administration of justice, cultivating a soil which 
 yielded bountifully, yet required but light labour ; with 
 a religion strict as regards the morals which are essen- 
 tial to individual, domestic and national peace, yet 
 indulgent in every kind of social and festive enjoyment 
 — the descendants of Abraham had reached a higher 
 state of virtue and happiness than any other nation of 
 the period." 
 
 Now for the fatal change which, in the days of the 
 Prophet Samuel, the last and greatest of the Judges, 
 converted the peaceful Republic into a warlike 
 Monarchy. The Elders came to the venerable Chief 
 of the State and said ; ** Make us a King to judge us 
 like all the nations." And they had their wish under 
 solemn divine protest that in choosing a King they 
 were rejecting God Himself: — 
 
 And the Lord said unto Samuel : Now therefore hearken unto 
 their voice ; howbeit thou shalt show them the manner of the King 
 that shalt reign over them. 
 
 And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that 
 asked of him a King, and he said : 
 
 This will be the manner of the King that shall reign over you ; 
 he will take your sons, and appoint them unto him for his chariots, 
 and to be his horsemen, and they shall run before his chariots. 
 
 And he will appoint them unto him for captains of thousands, 
 and captains of fifties; and he will set some to plow his ground, 
 and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and 
 the instruments of his chariots. 
 
 And he shall take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to 
 be cooks, and to be bakers. 
 
 And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your olive- 
 yards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. 
 
 And he will take a tenth of your seed, and ol your vineyards, 
 and give to his officers, and to his servants. 
 
 And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, 
 and your goodliebt young men, and your asses, and put them to 
 his work. 
 
 He will take a tenth of your flocks ; and ye shall be his servants. 
 
 And ye shall call out in that day because of your King which ye 
 shall have chosen you : and the Lord will not answer you in that 
 day. — I. Sam., viii., 9-18. 
 
 Now, therefore, stand still and see this gre^t thing, which th" 
 Lord will do before your eyes.
 
 68 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 Is it not wheat -harvest to-day ? I will call unto the Lord, that 
 he may send thunder and rain ; and ye shall know and soe that 
 your wickedness is great, which ye have done in the sight of the 
 Lord, in asking you a King. 
 
 So Samuel called unto the Lord ; and the Lord sent thunder 
 and rain that day ; and all the people greatly feared the Lord and 
 Samuel. 
 
 And all the people said unto Samuel : Pray for thy servants unto 
 the Lord thy God, that we die not ; for we have added unto all 
 our sins this evil, to ask us a King. — L Sam., xii.. 16-19. 
 
 To pen a more vivid description of Monarchy than 
 is here presented were impossible. It is applicable to 
 the institution wherever and whenever it has been 
 tolerated, and the Israelites were not long in feeling its 
 baneful effects. 
 
 Their first King, Saul, repeatedly violated the Con- 
 stitution, and, like so many modern crowned heads, 
 intermittently went mad. 
 
 David, it is clear, was both a grossly self-indulgent 
 and negligent ruler, otherwise it is inconceivable that 
 his son Absalom should have been able to head so very 
 formidable a rebellion against him. 
 
 As for the " glory " of Solomon, it was the offspring 
 of oppression unknown before in the annals of the 
 nation. He was an oriental despot of the worst type, 
 and the true effects of his own and his father's rule on 
 •' the condition-of- Israel question " are to be found in the 
 insurrection of Jeroboam. That democratic leader 
 had been compelled to seek refuge in Egypt in Solo- 
 mon's reign ; but he returned at his death, with what 
 results we know. Jereboam " and all the Congregation 
 of Israel " demanded of the new Monarch, Rehoboam, 
 a redress of national grievances as the condition of 
 their allegiance: — 
 
 And the King answered the people roughly, saying : My father 
 made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke ; my father 
 chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions. 
 
 And when all Israel saw that the King hearkened not unto them, 
 the people answered the King, saying. What portion have we in 
 David ? neither have we inheritance in the son of Jesse ; to your 
 tents, O Israel. — I. Ki.\gs, xii., 13, 14, 16. 
 
 The nation split into two kingdoms, and the breach 
 was never healed. The divinely-constituted Home
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 69 
 
 Rule Republic had preserved the national integrity for 
 probably four centuries and a half; three monarchical 
 reigns sufficed, permanently, to disrupt it. Calamity 
 followed calamity, until at last the frightful maledic- 
 tions pronounced by Moses against the stiff-necked 
 royalty-ridden race, were startlingly realised by the 
 Hebrews in full measure. 
 
 The Lord shall bring thee and thy King, which thou shalt set over 
 thee, unto a nation which thou hast not known, thou nor thy fathers ; 
 and there shalt thou serve other gods, wood and stone. 
 
 And thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb and a by 
 word, among all the peoples whither the Lord shall lead thee away. 
 
 Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but they shall not be thine ; 
 for they shall go into captivity. 
 
 The Lord shall bring a nation against thee from afar, from the 
 end of the earth, as the eagle flieth ; a nation whose tongue thou 
 shalt not understand ; a nation of a fierce countenance, which shall 
 not regard the person of the old, nor show favour to the young. 
 
 And he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, until thy high and 
 fenced walls come down, wherein thou trustedst, throughout all 
 thy land ; and he shall besiege thee in all thy gates throughout all 
 thy land, which the Lord thy God hath given thee. 
 
 And the Lord shall scatter thee among all peoples, from the one 
 end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth. 
 
 And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, and there shall 
 be no rest for the sole of thy foot. — Deut. xxvni. 36, 37, 41, 49, 50, 
 52. 64, 65. 
 
 But the internal misery which the Monarchy brought 
 on the Israelites has a deeper meaning for us, and for 
 all Monarchical Europe, than the complete external 
 ruin. The Prophets who stood up so manfully for 
 the democratic principles of the old Republic were not 
 slow to note the infinite social woes which Hebrew 
 Royalty, according to prediction, brought in its train :^ 
 
 The Lord will enter in judgement with the Elders of his people, 
 and the Princes thereof. 
 
 It is ye that have eaten up the vineyard ; the spoil of the poor is 
 in your houses ; what mean ye that ye crush my people, and grind 
 the face of the poor, saith the Lord. — Isaiah hi., 14, 15. 
 
 Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and to the writers 
 that write perverseness ; to turn aside the needy from judgment 
 and to take away the right of the poor of my people that widows 
 may be their spoil, and that they may make the fatherless their 
 prey! — Isaiah x., i, 2. 
 
 The author of the magnificent drama of Job, who
 
 tttE COSPEL of tHE POOft. 
 
 wrote about the end of the seventh century before Christ, 
 thus sets forth in words that burn the sufferings of the 
 land-robbed poor of his day, begotten of the monarchical 
 
 regime : — 
 
 2. There are that remove the landmarks; they violently take away 
 flocks, and feed them. 
 
 3. They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take the widows 
 Ox for a pledge. 
 
 4. They turn the needy out of the way ; the poor of tho :earth 
 hide themselves together, 
 
 5. Behold, as wild asses in the desert they go forth to their work, 
 seeking diligently for meat ; the wilderness yieldeth them food for 
 their children. 
 
 6. They cut their provender in the field, and they glean the vin- 
 tage of the wicked. 
 
 7. They lie all night naked without clothing, and have no covering 
 in the cold. 
 
 8. They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace 
 the rock for want of a shelter. 
 
 g. There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast, and take a 
 pledge of the poor. 
 
 10. So that they go about naked without clothing, and being an 
 hungred they carry the sheaves. — Job xxiv., 3 — 10. 
 
 After a somewhat similar recital of oppressions the 
 Prophet Amos (790 b.c.) asks, what the awakened con- 
 science of England is asking to-day, ** Shall not the land 
 tremble for this ? "
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR, 7t 
 
 No. XIIT. 
 
 •<GIVE US A KING."— Sam. vni., 6. 
 
 William came over the sea 
 
 With bloody sword came he. 
 
 Cold heart and bloody hand 
 
 Now rule the English land.— Snorro's Saga. 
 
 Still press us for your cohorts, 
 
 And when the fight is done. 
 Still fill your garners from the soil 
 
 That our good swords have won. 
 Still like a spreading ulcer 
 
 That leech-craft may not cure. 
 Let your foul usance eat away 
 
 The substance of the poor.— Macaulay's LavP. 
 
 God said I am tired of Kings, 
 
 I suffer them no more ; 
 Up to mine ear the morning brings, 
 
 The outrage of the poor. 
 
 My angel, his name is Freedom, 
 
 Choose him to be your King ; 
 He shall cut pathways east aud west, 
 
 And fend you with his wing. 
 
 I break your bonds and masterships, 
 
 And I unchain the slave ; 
 Free be his heart and hand henceforth 
 
 As Wind and wandering wave. — Emerson. 
 
 There is nothing more remarkable in Jehovah's deal- 
 ings with the Israelites than the fact that they were 
 permitted to break His law, if such was their wish. If 
 they desired to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good
 
 72 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 and evil, let them eat and abide the consequences. A 
 King they would have, and a King they got, to their 
 lasting confusion and ours. 
 
 Christ, it is true, abolished the godless institution, 
 root and branch, when He enjoined on His followers : 
 The Princes of the Gentiles bear dominion over them, and their 
 great ones exercise authority upon them, hut among you 
 (Christians) it shall not be so. He that would be greatest among 
 you let him be the least, let him be the servant of all. But 
 being Christians only in name, we care nothing for the 
 Master's plain admonition, and like the Jews of old will 
 have Kings to reign over us. 
 
 And even in countries that are ostensibly Republican 
 it is much the same. In the United States, for example, 
 the President's privileges are enormous. He is, in point 
 of fact, what among German Republicans is called Ein 
 Konig im frack — a King in a dress coat, and an enormous 
 influence for evil in the Republic. 
 
 We tried a Republic once ourselves in these islands, 
 with a similar result. We beheaded Charles Stuart, 
 the King, but hastened to set up in his place Oliver 
 Cromwell as Lord Protector. Nothing was changed 
 but the name. If the Monarchy of Queen Victoria were 
 to be set aside to-morrow, a Gomarchy of some sort 
 would almost certainly take its place. Christ said : 
 My service is perfect freedom ; but we will have none of it. 
 Guelphs and Grand Old Men are the Gods of our 
 demented adoration. 
 
 Among the Jewish Kings, in whose favour the Israel- 
 ites ** rejected " Jehovah that He " should not reign 
 over them," were a few whose careers seem not wholly 
 unworthy ; but among our own crowned heads not one 
 that may not, without exaggeration, be described as 
 criminal. Norman William, the Conqueror, and his 
 sons who successively succeeded him, William Rufiis 
 and Henry I., cut off by the sword and famine, it has 
 been calculated, one-third of the entire English people, 
 and divided the whole soil of the country among them- 
 selves, and the bandits who aided them. 
 
 What a commentary have we here on the words of
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 73 
 
 the Lord to Samuel touching the manner of the King 
 that should reign over the infatuated Israelites : 
 
 And he (the King) will take your fields, and your vineyards, and 
 your olive yards, even the best of them, and give them to his 
 servants. — I. Sam. vhi., 14. 
 
 Not content with the "best of them" the Conqueror 
 and his cut-throats practically took all of them. Before 
 they set sail from Normandy they procured a map of 
 England with every castle and manor carefully indicated, 
 and, by anticipation, divided the vast spoil among them 
 on paper. And this robber compact, as if to justify the 
 proverbial honour that is said to obtain among thieves, 
 was afterwards executed with scrupulous fidelity. Nor 
 was that all. It is in force to this day, with a whole 
 Hereditary Chamber of the Legislature (the House of 
 Landlords) to see that from generation to generation it 
 shall fail in no jot or tittle. 
 
 Five hundred hereditary Peers to-day own one-fifth 
 of the soil of the whole country. For liberty — a very 
 restricted liberty — to till this goodly domain they levy 
 on the cultivators a private tax called Rent of more 
 than fourteen millions sterlings per annum. Public taxa- 
 tion is inquitous enough and crushing enough, but as 
 compared with this monstrous system of private tribute 
 wrung from the landless multitude by the landed few, it 
 is what the late Lord Beaconsfield would have called a 
 •• flea-bite." All the same, the system is of the very 
 essence of " law and order." What then can be said ? 
 '* The prophets prophesy falsely ; by them the priests 
 bear rule ; and my people love to have it so." 
 
 But these evils, it may be said, are the natural out- 
 come of the despotic military Monarchy which they 
 have outlived, and not inherent in the institution as 
 such. What of the benign Constitutional Monarchy of 
 Queen Victoria ? Well, let us see. Foolish people 
 in the South often grumble because of the Queen's 
 alleged partiality, and that of her late husband, for the 
 Highlands of Scotland ; but they little know how glad 
 we Scotsmen would be to see the last of her and hers 
 on Deeside. From first to last the presence of Royalty
 
 74 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 at Balmoral has been an unmitigated curse to the 
 country. 
 
 From the moment the Prince Consort set the example 
 of deer-stalking, deer-preserving, and deer-foresting, 
 that quadruped became ^^a^, while the unfortunate biped 
 man became correspondingly cheap. The Court set the 
 fashion, and every wealthy " Society " snob, or would- 
 be " Society " snob, must have his deer-forest or shoot- 
 ing-box, in as close proximity as possible to Royalty, 
 at whatever cost. Need we wonder then at the de- 
 population of the Highlands, which is even now going 
 on under the eyes of the nation almost with impunity ? 
 
 I can just remember the cry of alarm that went up, 
 led off by the Tunes, at the most critical moment of the 
 Crimean War. " Where are our brave Highlanders ? " 
 Where ? Why, banished by whole clans almost to the 
 snows of Canada, the Australian bush, and the slums 
 of Glasgow, to make room for the more profitable sheep 
 and deer. It was not polite then to let the truth be 
 known, for the war was a war of the " classes," whose 
 also was the work of depopulation, and sheep and deer 
 could not well be sent out to fight the Russians. 
 
 And he (the King) will take your daughters to be confectionaries, 
 and to be cooks, and to be bakers. 
 
 And he will take your menservants and your maidservants, and 
 your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his 
 work. — I. Sam., viii., 13 — 16. 
 
 To war, land-grabbing, and the chase — the pastimes 
 of Kings and aristocrats and the ruin of nations — the 
 heavy burden of wasteful luxury and its purveyors, 
 the "confectionaries, the cooks, and the bakers" of 
 the text, must be added. Mr. Alexander Wylie, in 
 his " Labour, Leisure, and Luxury," calculates that 
 !tj this country the enormous sum of ;^4oo,ooo,ooo per 
 annum are spent in downright superfluities. Of this 
 criminal waste Royalty and the Rich (7 per cent, of 
 the population), to whom Royalty is as the sun in the 
 firmament, are responsible for ;^37o, 000,000, or 92 per 
 cent, of the whole; while 36 per cent, of the entire 
 work done in the country is absorbed in this scandalous 
 fashion.
 
 The COSt»EL OP THE POOR. ^5 
 
 Yet tht doom of Prince, Peer, and Plutocrat is fixed 
 and the vindication of the Poor is determined in the 
 counsels of the God of Righteousness : — 
 
 7. Yet he shall perish for ever like his own dung : They which 
 have seen him shall say, Where is he ? 
 
 8. He shall fly away as a dream, and shall not be found. Yea, 
 he shall be chased away as a vision of the night. 
 
 9. The eye which saw him shall see him no more ; Neither shall 
 his place any more behold him. 
 
 10. His children shall seek the favour of the poor, And his hands 
 shall give back his wealth. 
 
 11. His bones are full of youth, But it shall lie down with him in 
 the dust. 
 
 12. Though wickedness be in his mouth, Though he hide it under 
 his tongue. 
 
 13. Though he spare it, And will not let it go, but keep it still 
 within his mouth ; 
 
 14 Yet his meat in his bowels is turned ; It is the gall of asps 
 within him. 
 
 15. He hath swallowed down riches, and he shall vomit them up 
 again ; God shall cast them out of his belly. 
 
 16. He shall suck the poison of asps ; The viper's tongue shall 
 slay him. 
 
 17. He shall nci look upon the rivers. The flowing streams of 
 honey and butter. 
 
 x8. That which he laboured for shall he restore and shall not 
 swallow it down ; According to the substance that he hath gotten, 
 he shall not rejoice. 
 
 19. For he hath oppressed and forsaken the poor ; He hatb 
 violently taken away an house, and ha shall not build it up.— 
 Job XX, 7 — 19. 
 
 I
 
 76 THE GOSPEL OF THE POORo 
 
 No. XIV. 
 
 THE PROPHETS. 
 
 On earth of all deeds that are done, O God, there is none without 
 
 Thee. 
 In the holy aether not one, nor one on the face of the sea ! 
 Save the deeds that evil men driven by their own blind folly have 
 
 planned ; 
 But things that have grown uneven, are made even again by Thy 
 
 hand! 
 And things unseemly grow seemly, the unfriendly are friendly to 
 
 thee! 
 For so good and evil supremely Thou hast blended in one by decre3. 
 For all Thy decree is one ever — a word that endureth for aye, 
 Which mortals rebellious endeavour to flee from and shun to obey. 
 Ill-fated, that, worn with proneness for the lordship of goodly 
 
 things. 
 Neither hear nor behold, in its Oneness the law that divinity brings ; 
 Wliich men with reason obeying, might attain unto glorious Ufe, 
 No longer aimlessly straying in the ways of ignoble strife. 
 O Father I dispel from their souls the darkness, and grant them the 
 
 light 
 Of Reason, Thy stay, when the whole wide world Thou rulest with 
 
 might. 
 That we, being honoured, may honour Thy name with the music of 
 
 hymns, 
 Extolling the deeds of the Donor, unceasing, as rightly beseems 
 Mankind, for no worthier trust is awarded to God or to man 
 Than for ever to glory with juGtice in the law that endures and is 
 
 One. — Thomas Davidson : Cleanthcs. 
 
 It is now time to resume the thread of Hebrew 
 history, and in the fewest strokes possible to bring it 
 down to the days of Christ. 
 
 Solomon died in the year B.C. 978, and his death, it 
 has been seen, was speedily followed by revolution and 
 the irrevocable disruption of the kingdom. His gilded 
 
 I
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 77 
 
 yoke, which had become intolerable to men who remem- 
 bered the old days of Republican simplicity and freedom, 
 his foolish son, Rehoboam, threatened to aggravate, 
 and forfeited, in consequence, the allegiance of the Ten 
 Northern Tribes. In place of one fairly powerful 
 Monarchy, two fatally weak ones now struggled side by 
 side for a precarious existence. 
 
 Of the Monarchs both of Israel and Judah almost 
 nothing need be said, except that they were, in nine 
 cases out of ten, tyrants and idolaters of the worst type. 
 But there was a vigorous Democratic Opposition in 
 both kingdoms with which we are more concerned. 
 These were the " Prophets of God " who strenuously 
 kept alive the idea of a Righteous Ruler of the Universe, 
 whose especial care was the poor and oppressed^.. 2nd 
 in Whom there was neither variableness, nor shadow of 
 turning. 
 
 Prophecy proper had its birth in the days of Samuel. 
 Up to the Eighth Century B.C. the Prophets formed a 
 distinct party in the State, and acted in union. Their 
 guilds materially influenced national politics and were 
 at the bottom of several radical revolutions. They 
 frequently succeeded in removing vicious princes and 
 in changing dynasties. Prophets of the school of 
 Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha differed greatly in character 
 from those of the Eighth and Seventh Centuries b.c, 
 whose words have come down to us. They were men 
 of action rather than preachers or writers. 
 
 But in one respect they and such noble inheriters of 
 the prophetic spirit as Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah 
 did not differ. All were profoundly pious men who 
 firmly believed that they were directly commissioned by 
 Jehovah to reveal His will to their fellow men. Their 
 ideas were not the offspring of earnest reflection or 
 patient investigation, but of swiftly miraculous intuition. 
 Such intuitions were to them the '• Word of God," and 
 it were hard to And a fltter definition. 
 
 Prophets, it may be said, were common enough 
 Among othernations of antiquity, besides the Hebrews. 
 True, but there was this difference : Among the Greeks
 
 •^8 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 and Egyptians, for instance, the prophetjc function 
 was as closely connected with temple-service as the 
 priestly. The Prophets of Israel, on the contrary, 
 were an entirely independent body of men drawn in- 
 differently from all ranks and occupations of the people. 
 In their criticism they spared neither prince nor priest, 
 and even at times disparaged the temple sacrifices and 
 ritual as matters of indifference. The good revered 
 them ; the evil feared them. 
 
 But, just as Christianity began to '• fail" the moment 
 It was transformed, or rather deformed, into Churchianity 
 by a paid priesthood, so did the sources of Prophecy 
 dry up when it came to be regarded as a genteel means 
 of livelihood. " False prophets," inspired only by iove 
 of lucre and social status, arose, and the prophetic 
 function rapidly sank in public estimation. So much 
 so was this the case that Amos, the herdsman of Tekoa 
 in Judah (790 — 780 B.C.), boasts that he is neither a 
 prophet nor the son of a prophet, that is to say, that he 
 had not been trained in their schools, and did not affect 
 their status. After Amos the schools of the prophets 
 ceased to exist, and the phenomenon of prophecy 
 became sporadic and a source of infinite tribulation to 
 him "to whom the Word of God came." The later 
 prophets were, for the most part, isolated preachers, 
 tar in advance of public opinion, and seldom able to 
 rally even a handful of followers. 
 
 Yet great has been the influence of these faithful 
 voices crying in the wilderness. Until the times of 
 Amos (B.C. 790), Hosea(B.c. 775-745), Micah(B.c. 757), 
 and Isaiah (circa 757), strict Monotheism can hardly 
 be said to have been taught in Israel or elsewhere. 
 Jehovah, had indeed been the Lord God of Israel, but 
 It was not denied that surrounding nations had their 
 Gods also. Chemosh was the God of Ammon, Milcom 
 was the God of Moab and so forth. The Gods were 
 tribal and territorial. Hence the otherwise inexplic- 
 able proneness of the Hebrews to participate in the 
 vile sensual worship of their Canaanitish neighbours, 
 when they believed they had come within the juris-
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 79 
 
 diction or circle of influence of their neighbours' Gods, 
 .\s soon as the Prophets announced that the God of 
 Israel was also the God of all other nations, the 
 solidarity of mankind; Jew and Gentile, was practically 
 affirmed. Jehovah ceased to be a God amon^ Gods, 
 and, though the Hebrew might still patriotically 
 appeal to Him as the Lord God of Israel, He had 
 become much more — He had become the common 
 Divine Inheritance of the human race. When the Son 
 of Man came, He fulfilled the Prophets by expand- 
 ing correspondingly the other term of the relation. 
 For " Israel, the People of God," He substituted 
 «• Man, the Child of God." 
 
 Dr. Robertson Smith, in his Prophets in Israel, claims 
 for Isaiah the grand distinction of having been the 
 first completely to disassociate religious faith from the 
 bondage and trammels of national forms : — 
 
 " The circle that gathered round Isaiah and his 
 household in these evil days, holding themselves apart 
 from their countrymen, treasuring the word of revelation, 
 and waiting for Jehovah, were indeed, as Isaiah 
 describes them, 'signs and tokens in Israel from Jehovah 
 of Hosts that dwellethin Mount Zion.' The formation 
 of this little community was a new thing in the history 
 of religion. Till then no one had dreamed of a fellow- 
 ship of faith, dissociated from all national forms, main- 
 tained without the exercise of ritual services, bound 
 together by faith in the Divine Word alone. It was the 
 birth of a new era in the Old Testament religion, for it 
 was the birth of the conception of the Church, the first 
 step in the emancipation of spiritual religion from the 
 forms of political life — a step not less significant that 
 all its consequences were not seen till centuries had 
 passed away.'' 
 
 The glorious roll of Hebrew Prophets terminated 
 with Malachi, who was a contemporary of Ezra, 
 Nehemiah and the generation of exiles who returned 
 from the Babylonish captivity. From that time the 
 Law took fatal hold on the religious life of the nation, 
 and the quickening spirit of free prophecy was almost
 
 8o THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 crushed out of existence by its deadening weight. As 
 the scribe became a power, the prophet's creative energy 
 waned. God ceased to speak to and through the living 
 soul of man. The Word of God could only be read in 
 parchment rolls, from which the most unwarrantabl* 
 deductions were but too frequently made.
 
 THE GOSPEL CF THE POOR. 8l 
 
 No. XV. 
 
 THE MESSIANIC EXPECTATION. 
 One's duty is to become first man, then God. — Hierocles. 
 
 What is loved by us here is mortal and hurtful. Our love is love 
 for an image that often turns into its opposite, because what we 
 loved was not truly worthy of love, nor the good which we sought. 
 God alone is the true object of our love. — Plotinus. 
 
 My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my 
 ways, saith the Lord. — Isaiah. 
 
 Are not five sparrows sold for tv.-o farthings ? And not one of 
 them is forgotten in the sight of God. But the very hairs of your 
 head are all numbered. — Jesus Christ. 
 
 If God acts in all things, and such action in no way derogates 
 from His dignity, but even belongs to His universal and supreme 
 power, He cannot consider it below Him, nor does it stain His 
 dignity, if He extend His providence to the individual things of this 
 world. — St. Thomas Aquinas. 
 
 We loved Him because He first loved us. If a man say, I love 
 God, and hateth his neighbour, he is a liar. — St, John, 
 
 Love ! Yes, the whole secret is in that one word. By adding 
 love to the conception of the God of His people, by exemplifying it 
 in His own life, and demanding it in His followers, Jesus accom- 
 plished what had baffled all the wisdom of the Greek sages. Ha 
 restored the moral unity of man, abolished the whole world, and 
 made a new heaven and a new earth. — Thomas Davidson : 
 Aristotle. 
 
 Religion, as we conceive it, is the relation that exists 
 betweenthe immortal soul of the individual and Supreme 
 Being. But this was far from the standpoint of the
 
 82 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 Old Testament Proplicts. They regarded the indi- 
 vidual as mortal, and the entire Hebrew community as 
 the religious Unit. In the New Testament every 
 believer becomes a child of God ; in the Old Testament 
 it is the nation of Israel that is Jehovah's Son. The 
 distinction is fundamental, and, though very simple, it 
 yet requires no inconsiderable effort of attention to 
 grasp its full significaxice. 
 
 The surrounding tribes or nations held precisely the 
 same idea respecting the relation between themselves 
 and their Gods as did the Hebrews ; but there was 
 this cardinal difference : Jehovah was a moral, just, 
 righteous and holy God, whereas the deities of the 
 Canaanites were as frail as themselves, or worse. 
 Even the enterprising and intelligent Phoenicians of 
 Tyre and Sidon, the maritime pioneers of civilization 
 in the Ancient World, carried the frightful pollution of 
 their worship into the most distant lands which they 
 visited. 
 
 Their Gods had a two-fold type — male and female. 
 The male was Baal, the female Ashtoreth. They were 
 the productive powers of Nature, and often, in conse- 
 quence, identified respectively with the Sun and the 
 Moon. The feasts held in their honour were all literal 
 expressions of sexuality and sensuality, in which these 
 deities were themselves supposed to delight. No sexual 
 excess, no drunken carousal was other than an act of 
 devotion if performed at the sanctuaries or sacred feasls 
 of the Baalim. Hence the vast superiority of the 
 Hebrew faith over that of every other people of antiquity. 
 
 Even the Gods of Greece and Rome perished with 
 the States in which they were worshipped for ages. 
 Not so the religion of Israel. Every calamity that be- 
 fell the Hebrew Commonwealth seemed to bestow on 
 it a fresh lease of life, to expand, purify, and exalt it. 
 But it was an affair of very slow and painful develop- 
 ment ; and they err greatly who seek in the Old Testa- 
 ment for too precise previsions of the events and 
 doctrines of the New. 
 
 Take, for example, the Messianic hope or expectatioa
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. , 83 
 
 undoubtedly entertained in some form or other by most 
 of the Prophets. These holy men, it is clear, only saw 
 ** through a glass darkly," and held no uniform views of 
 what the " Christ," the " Anointed One," was to achieve 
 for mankind. They were agreed as to the certainty of 
 "the good time coming," but portrayed the lineaments 
 of the ** Messiah "' in very different, if not positively 
 inconsistent, colours. Amos, Hosea, Zechariah, Micah, 
 and Isaiah sketch the glories of the Coming Day in 
 language of great sublimity and much to the same pur- 
 pose. Jehovah is to reunite the kingdoms of Israel 
 and Judah under a Davidic Prince of noble qualities, 
 on whom His Spirit should be abundantly outpoured. 
 
 But Jeremiah, a century later than Isaiah, put off the 
 setting up of the Tabernacle of David to a much remoter 
 future, and predicted the carrying away into Babylon 
 and endless miseries antecedent to the return thence. 
 Thereupon Jehovah would enter into a new covenant 
 with Israel: — *' He will put his law into their inward 
 parts, and write it in their hearts ; He will be their God, 
 and they shall be His people. And they shall teach no 
 more every man his brother saying * Know Jehovah,' for 
 they shall all know Him from the least of them unto the 
 greatest of them ; and Jehovah will forgive their iniquity 
 and remember their sin no more." 
 
 Like other prophets, Jeremiah makes a righteous 
 branch of the house of David inaugurate this era by 
 blessing and felicity ; but on that point the wonderful 
 "Second Isaiah," as he is called, an unknown prophet 
 of the captivity period is silent. He strikes a keynote 
 of the most novel and extraordinary character. The 
 Messiah no longer figures as a puissant prince, but as a 
 suffering saviour of mankind. Knappert in his Religion 
 of Israel (Armstrong's translation) writes thus of the 
 Messianic exjiectation of the " Second Isaiah." — 
 
 " Instead of the ideal put forward by the older Prophets, 
 we find him expressing the expectation that Jehovah 
 would glorify Himself in His ' servant.' Jehovah has 
 chosen this servant to Himself, and for his sake He will 
 be gracious to the whole of IsraeL , But to thut end the
 
 84 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 servant must take the sins of bis people upon himself; 
 being a part of Israel he must bear Israel's diseases, 
 be wounded for Israel's sins and bruised for Israel's 
 iniquities. Then, and not till then, shall the glory of old 
 be restored, and Israel shall have dominion over the 
 heathen. And even these shall be converted by the 
 servant of Jehovah. They shall be witnesses of his 
 patient suffering, they shall hearken to his preaching, 
 and become acquainted with Jehovah, and call upon 
 him as their God. Thus shall the servant of Jehovah 
 be a light to the Gentiles and lead them unto righteous- 
 ness." 
 
 In the "Second Isaiah," Messianic prophecy cul- 
 minated. Knappert is of opinion that by •' the Servant 
 of Jehovah " the Prophet did not mean any particular 
 individual, but "the religious kernel of the nation" 
 personified. But even were that so, the kernel of the 
 "religious kernel of the nation " was undoubtedly the 
 Man of Sorrows, whether the prophet had an absolutely 
 clear conception of His wonderful personality and career 
 or not. 
 
 Professor Robertson Smith, in his Old Testament in the 
 Jewish Church, thus pertinently speaks of the human 
 element inseparable from the divine in revelation, and 
 with his wise words I fully agree. " If the Bible sets 
 forth the personal converse of God with man, it is 
 absolutely essential to look at the human side. The 
 Prophets and Psalmists were not mere impassive 
 channels through whose lips or pens God poured forth 
 an abstract doctrine. He spoke not only through 
 them ; they had an intelligent share in the Divine con- 
 verse with them ; and we can no more understand the 
 Divine Word without taking them into account, than 
 we can understand a human conversation without 
 taking account of both interlocutors. To try to suppress 
 the human side of the Bible, in the interests of the 
 purity of the Divine Word, is as great a folly as to think 
 that a father's talk with his child can be best reported 
 by leaving out everything that the child thought, and 
 felt
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 85 
 
 *' The first condition of a sound understanding of 
 Scripture is to give lull recognition to the human side, 
 to master the full situation and character and feeling 
 of each human interlocutor who has a part in the drama 
 of revelation. Nay^ the whole business of scholarly exegesis 
 lies ivith this human side. All that earthly study and 
 research can do for the reader of Scripture is to put him 
 in the position of the man to whose heart God first 
 spoke. What is more than this lies beyond our wisdom. 
 It is only the Spirit of God which can make the Word 
 a living word to our hearts, as it was a living word to 
 him who first received it."
 
 86 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 No. XVI. 
 
 AFTER THE CAPTIVITY. 
 
 He that does good to another man does also good to himself, not 
 only in the consequence, but in the very act of doing it ; for th'j 
 consciousness of well-doing is an ample reward. — Seneca. 
 
 A noble heart will disdain to subsist like a drone upon others' 
 labours ; like a vermin, to filch his food out of the public grauciries ; 
 or like a shark to prey upon the lesser fry. — Barrow. 
 
 You are no sister of ours ; what shadow of proof is there ? Here 
 are our parchments, our padlocks, proving indisputably our money- 
 safes to be ours, and you have no business with them. Depart ! It 
 is impossible ! Nay what wouldst thou thyself have us do ? cry 
 indignant readers. Nothing, my friends — till you have got a soul for 
 yourselves again. Till then all things are impossible. — Carlyle. 
 
 Unless institutions are souled by earnest and capable men tliey 
 have no more chance of earnest and beneficent activity than dead 
 bodies have of climbing mountains. — Peter Bayne. 
 
 Woe to him that increaseth that which is not his. — Habakuk 
 II.. 6. 
 
 I desire that all my brethren should labour at useful occupations, 
 that one may be less of a burden to the people. Those who cannot 
 work let them learn to work. The lukewarm, and those who do not 
 work sincerely and humbly, v/ill be rejected by God. — St. Francis 
 d'Assisi. 
 
 In order to understand the Chiist and Ilis IMessage 
 to Mankind, it is necessary, in some measure, to realise 
 the condition of the society into which He was born. 
 It was a society on which conquest by foreign nations 
 had worked great changes. The carrying away into
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. ^J 
 
 Babylon (b.c. 597) by Nebuchadnezzar brought the Jews 
 into intimate relations firstly with the Chaldeans, and 
 secondly, when Babylon was taken by Cyrus (b.c. 538), 
 with the Persians. These great Oriental Powers, as 
 well as the Hebrews, had their Wise Men, their 
 Religions, their Scriptures, and it was not possible that 
 they should fail to impart to the Jewish exiles some 
 portion of their own spirit and vieAvs of life. 
 
 For some reason or other Cyrus was remarkably 
 gracious to the Jews whom he found in Babylon. They 
 may have helped him to capture the city, or he may 
 have been struck by the similarity of their religion to 
 his own. Anyhow, he permitted them to return to their 
 own land, under the leadership of Zerubbabel, of the 
 Davidic line, and Joshua, grandson of the last Hi^h 
 Priest. 
 
 But, though many returned, others elected to remain, 
 and between the remnant and their brethren in Palestine 
 a constant intercourse was kept up. One notable result 
 was the adoption into the Hebrew ritual of the Persian 
 Feast of Purim. 
 
 From the Persians the Jews, to a very large extent, 
 acquired their ideas about "angels" and "devils." 
 In the older ante-Persian theology Satan takes his 
 place in the Council of Heaven with the other 
 Ministers of Jehovah. He is the accuser merely, a sort 
 of public prosecutor whose function it also is to execute 
 the judgments of Jehovah on erring men. The Satan 
 of Job has a poor opinion of human nature, but he has 
 no personal animus, so to speak, against the Man of 
 Uz. It is Jehovah that brings evil on individuals and 
 communities. Amos (in., 6) asks pointedly: "Shall 
 there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done 
 it?" 
 
 But after the Captivity, Satan entered on what, in 
 Spurgeonic phraseology, may be called the " down 
 grade." He appears as the Creator of evil, and no 
 longer the Minister, but the powerful adversary of 
 Jehovah. He assumes the garb of the Persian Ahriman, 
 and Jewish Monotheism is in peril of being trans-
 
 88 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 formed into Persian dmlism, or the belief in two 
 ultimate powers, Ormuzd and Ahriman. 
 
 How far the Jews were indebted to the Persians for 
 their notions of personal immortality it is difficult to 
 say. The Tory Sadducee rejected the belief even 
 in Christ's day, whereas the Persians, it is certain, 
 entertained the doctrine from a remote antiquity in 
 the very definite form of the resurrection of the dead. 
 
 The Temple was rebuilt by the returned exiles 
 (B.C. 516), and the Jews entered on a fresh era of more 
 or less dependent national life, in which the Chiei 
 Priest was the most prominent actor. Under this 
 regime, " burnt-ofiferings," thank-oflferings," " sin-offer- 
 ings," and guilt-offerings " abounded. The theory of 
 the " sin-offering " was that Jehovah accepted the soul 
 of the dumb animal in place of that of the articulate 
 sinner. It helped to deaden the moral sentiment, and 
 indirectly antagonised much that was best in the 
 teaching of the Prophets. Ritualism took the place 
 of inner righteousness. 
 
 The Law, as modified by Ezra, became the special 
 study of a class of men called " Scribes," or *' Lawyers," 
 who copied it out and explained it to the people. The 
 reading and explanation of the Scriptures took place in 
 the Synagogue or Assembly- hall, an institution that had 
 sprung up in Babylon. Synagogues were erected in 
 every community, and no Jew needed to remain in 
 ignorance of the contents of the Scriptures of his nation. 
 The struggle with the earher and grosser forms of 
 idolatry is now over. 
 
 In B.C. 332, Alexander the Great entered Jerusalem 
 in triumph, and Palestine became part of his vast 
 dominions. After his death Ptolemaeus, son of Lagos, 
 seized Judaea, which remained subject to Egyyt till 
 B.C. 203. 
 
 In that year the Seleucidse dynasty who ruled over 
 Syria and Babylon mastered it. In B.C. 175, in the reign 
 of Antiochus the Fourth, the Jews successfully rebellal, 
 captured Jerusalem, and became once more an inde- 
 pendent people. The valiant Judas Maccabaeus (the
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 8g 
 
 Hammer) with his heroic brothers Jonathan and Simon, 
 was the chief instrument of this surprising dehverance. 
 John, son of Simon, greatly extended the borders of 
 Judaea. He annexed Samaria, Gahlee, and the country 
 of the Idumasans (Edomites). John's son, Aristobulus, 
 assumed the title of King. To him succeeded Alex- 
 ander Janngeus, whose wife Alexandra, surviving him, 
 reigned as Queen till B.C. 70. 
 
 A bitter feud between Alexandra's two sons, Hyrcanus 
 the High Priest, and Aristobulus, brought the Romans 
 on the scene. Pompey captured Jerusalem b.c. 63, and 
 set up Hyrcanus as King. Antipater, the Idumaean, 
 had greatly contributed to the success of Hyrcanus, 
 but on his death Antigonus, son of Aristobulus renewed 
 the contest. Antipater's son, Herod (surnamed the 
 Great) had married Mariamne, the granddaughter of 
 Hyrcanus. He endeavoured to assert his supremacy, 
 but had to seek safety in flight, B.C. 40. At Rome, 
 the Senate recognized him as King. He captured 
 Jerusalem, B.C. 37, and rebuilt the Temple with 
 unbounded magnificence. 
 
 Herod had three sons who succeeded to his dominions 
 — Archelaus in Judea, Herod Antipas in Galilee, while 
 Philip ruled beyond Jordan. Archelaus was deposed 
 A.D. 6, and Judaea became Roman teritory. Herod 
 Antipas was banished a.d. 39, and Philip died a.d. 34. 
 
 The Governor of Syria ruled Judea also, but under 
 him, with head-quarters at Caesarea, was a Judean 
 Procurator, an office filled, a.d. 26-37, by Pontius 
 Pilate, under whom the mighty tragedy of the Crucifixion 
 was enacted. After Pilate's time, the procuratorship 
 Was suppressed, and Judea was fully incorporated with 
 Syria. 
 
 In A.D. 37 Herod Agrippa, grandson of Herod the 
 Great, obtained the Transjordanic Principality. To 
 this he added Galilee in 40, and in 41, by iavour of the 
 Emperor Claudius, Judea also. He died a.d. 44, and 
 Rome again asserted her unqualified supremacy. 
 Numerous insurrections followed, until at last, a.d. 6s(5 
 came a general rising and massacre of the Romans.
 
 90 THE GOSPEL OF Tllli: TOOR. 
 
 The Jews fought with the utmost resolution, and taxed 
 all the energies of Vespasian and his son Titus, two of 
 Rome's most capable commanders, to subdue them. 
 But the end came at last in the most appalling form 
 recorded in the pages of Universal History. The 
 Temple was given to the flames, the city razed to its 
 foundations, and the Hebrew nation, as such, blotted 
 out.
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. QX 
 
 No. XVII. 
 
 THE JEWISH SECTS. 
 
 In Rome every vice flaunted itself with revolting cynicism. — 
 Renan. 
 
 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. — St. Paul. 
 
 On that hard Pagan world disgust 
 
 A(d secret loathing fell, 
 Deep weariness and sated lust 
 
 Made human life a hell. 
 
 In his cool hall with haggard eyes 
 
 The Roman noble lay ; 
 He drove abroad in furious guise. 
 
 Along the Appian Way. 
 
 He made a feast, drank fierce and fast. 
 And crowned his hair with flowers — 
 
 No easier, nor no quicker pass'd 
 The impracticable hours. — Arnold. 
 
 In order to render unto Cassar that which is Caesar's, and to God 
 that which is God's, we must give to the Emperor the money which 
 bears his effigy, and to God man himself, made in His image. — 
 Tertullian. 
 
 The character of Christ has been the soul of all philanthropic 
 action in the modern State — has been the dynamical force in all 
 the beneficent agencies in our modern civilization. — Fairbairn. 
 
 In the year b.c. 332, Alexander the Great entered 
 Jerusalem, and from that date Greek and Gra^co- 
 Roman civilization began to affect Hebrew modes of 
 thouglit just as Persian ideals had formerly done. 
 Indeed, at one time the religion of Jehovah was in 
 imminent danger of effacement. King Antiochug
 
 92 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 Epiphanes, b.c. 167, not without the support of a 
 section of renegade Jews, actually sacrificed in the 
 Temple to a " strange God," probably Jupiter or Zeus, 
 and abolished the observance of the Sabbath and the 
 national festivals. 
 
 But this was going too fast and too far. The servants 
 of Jehovah rose in stern revolt under Judas Maccabaeus 
 captured Jerusalem, purifaed the sacred fane, and in 
 memory of the event, instituted the annual Feast of 
 the Renewal of the Temple, or Feast of Lights. 
 
 No sooner, however, was danger from without averted 
 than internal strife set in. The Saducees and the 
 Pharisees came into active conflict. The former were 
 probably so named from one Zadok, of whom nothing 
 is known. The latter — '* Pharisee " means separated — 
 were strict observers of the Law, and to them adhered 
 most of the Scribes whose origin and functions have 
 already been noted. The Saducee was a Conserva- 
 tive Aristocrat, the Pharisee a Puritan or Progressive, 
 who might be rich or poor, so long as he accepted the 
 party principles. 
 
 In doctrine the Saducee differed from the Pharisee 
 in one vital respect — he repudiated the immortality 
 of the soul, and made light of "angels" and "evil 
 spirits " as latter-day innovations and post-captivity 
 conceptions. The Pharisee, on the contrary, main- 
 tained the resurrection of the dead, and accepted 
 generally the novel ideas set forth in the Apocolyptic 
 {i.e. revealing) Book of Daniel, which the Saducee 
 must have regarded as unauthoritative. 
 
 In the reign of Alexander Tannaeus (b.c. 105-113), 
 
 Saducee and Pharisee actually came to blows, and 
 as many as 50,000 Pharisees were slain. In Christ's 
 day the Pharisee was often a hypocrite who ♦' for a 
 pretence made long prayers," but in the main he was 
 zealously religious according to his lights, and demo- 
 cratic in his sympathies. Paul, the great Apostle of 
 the Gentiles, was a Pharisee of the Pharisees. 
 
 Another religious sect, not named in the New 
 Testament, was the Essenes, to whom, some are of
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 93 
 
 opinion John the Baptist was attached. Their origin 
 is involved in great obscurity, and even the significa- 
 tion of the word " Essene '' is unknown. They lived 
 in remote villages near the Dead Sea, and, strange to 
 say, though minutely observant of the Law, they took 
 no part in the Temple services, and regarded sacrifices 
 with abhorence. They were total abstainers, vege- 
 tarians, and Communists. Admission to the order 
 involved a noviciate of three years, and the absolute 
 surrender to the Community of all private property. 
 To bear or forge arms was alike forbidden. The 
 stricter Essenes were celibates, but others married 
 like the rest of the world. Prayers were said before 
 sunrise. They then laboured till eleven, when they 
 bathed their bodies, dressed in white linen, and partook 
 of the common repast with song and thanksgiving. 
 They then resumed labour till the evening. The 
 government was by universal suffrage, and the elected 
 were implicitly obeyed. The relation of this pheno- 
 menal and most interesting sect to Christianity has 
 never yet been determined ; but that they were ani- 
 mated by a truly Christ-like spirit is undoubted. 
 
 Such, then, was the world of Jewish sects into which 
 Christ was born. It was not a lovely society, certainly, 
 but it was not wholly corrupt and degraded like the 
 circumjacent Roman Empire which even before the 
 advent of the Messiah, Judaism had gone some little 
 way to renovate morally. The spread of Christ's 
 Gospel of the Poor among the Gentiles was vastly 
 facilitated by the fact that in every considerable centre 
 emigrant Jews had already established little colonies, 
 with the inevitable Synagogue for the inculcation of the 
 Law and the Prophets. They had colonies at Babylon, 
 Damascus, Antioch, and all through the confines of Asia 
 Minor. They passed into Egypt, Nubia and Ethipia. 
 In Alexandria their influence almost predominated. 
 They settled in Greece and Macedonia, and even as 
 early as B.C. 150, they had secured a footing in the 
 Eternal City. They had learned in captivity that Pales- 
 tine was not the only land flowing with milk and honey.
 
 94 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 They found Paganism nearly ** played out " and a 
 certain readiness on the part of the more intelligent and 
 upright heathen to acknowledge the superiority of 
 Judaism and the unrivalled " righteousness " of its 
 ethical system. Many became proselytes. These were 
 either " Proselytes of Righteousness," or " Proselytes of 
 the Gate." The former undertook to observe all the 
 obligations of the Law ; the latter merely not to take 
 the name of Jehovah in vain, not to worship idols, and 
 not to eat things containing blood. These three Com- 
 mandments were termed Noachic, after Noah, and were 
 held as binding on all men. Of the numerous Mosaic 
 Commandments specially given to the Israelites, the 
 gatemen who sat near the entrance of the Synagogue 
 were expected to observe only two ; viz., to rest on the 
 Sabbath day and to use unleavened bread at the feast 
 of the Passover. 
 
 But if the influence of Hebrew ideas on the Grseco- 
 Roman world outside of Palestine was not inconsider- 
 able, Greek philosophy re-acted on the religious thought 
 of the Jews correspondingly. Especially was this the 
 case in the great centre of intellectual activity, Alex- 
 andria. It was there that the famous Septuagint or 
 Greek translation of the Old Testament came into use 
 among the Hebrew population that had ceased to speak 
 their own tongue, and there it was that the celebrated 
 man of letters, the Hellenist Jew Philo, a contemporary 
 of Christ, flourished. 
 
 Philo, though remaining a Jew, was thoroughly im- 
 bued with Greek ideas. He was a voluminous writer, 
 and in his allegorical system of scriptural interpreta- 
 tion is to be found the key to much that is mystical in 
 the beautiful Fourth Gospel. 
 
 Take, for example, the famous doctrine of the Logos. 
 Philo held that God does not operate directly on matter 
 from which he is eternally separate. With him the 
 Word of God is not merely a spoken fiat. It is the 
 Divine Personified Thought itself. Sundry other 
 Powers, such as Wisdom, proceed from God, but of 
 these the Logos or Word is the greatest. It is, in fact,
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 95 
 
 God Himself as He reveals Himself in humanity. Man 
 is Logos and Matter in strife, and it is given to Logos 
 by slow degrees to prevail and to come wholly to God. 
 " In the beginning," writes St. John, " was the Logos, 
 and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God." 
 Further on we read that this Logos, in its Divine 
 plentitude, " was made flesh, and dwelt among us " in 
 the Son of Man, Son of God, the Divine Man, the 
 Carpenter of Nazareth, the Way, the Truth, and the 
 Life, who came to sum up once for all the whole of thd 
 Law and the Prophets.
 
 96 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR, 
 
 No. XVIII. 
 
 THE NAZARENE. 
 
 The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, 
 
 The Spirit of wisdom and understanding, 
 
 The Spirit of counsel and might, 
 
 The Spirit of knowledge, and of the fear of the Lord : 
 
 And shall make Him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord. 
 
 He shall not judge after the sij^lit of His eyes, 
 
 Neither reprove after the hearing of His ears; 
 
 But with righteousness shall He judge the poor. 
 
 And reprove with equity for the meek of the earth ; 
 
 And He shall smite the earth with the rod of His mouth, 
 
 And with the breath of His lips shall he slay the wicked. 
 
 And righteousness shall be the girdle of His loins, 
 
 And faithfulness the girdle of His reins. 
 
 The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, 
 
 And the leopard shall also lie down with the kid, — Is.^i.'VH xl., 2 — 6. 
 
 For Wisdom dealt with mortal powers. 
 Where truth in closest words shall fail. 
 When truth embodied in a tale 
 
 Shall enter in at lowly doors. 
 
 And so the Word had breath, and wrought 
 With human hands the creed of creeds 
 In loveliness of perfect deeds. 
 
 More strong than all poetic thought ; 
 
 Which he may read that binds the sheaf, 
 Or builds the house, or digs the grave, 
 And those wild eyes that watch the wave 
 
 In roarings round the coral reef. — Tennyson. 
 
 The tale of Christ's Hfe, as recorded in the four 
 Gospels is either fact or fiction. If the latter, then it 
 is the business of the historian to explain the growth 
 of the legend and be done with it. This is what Strauss
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 97 
 
 and Renan, with much learning, have attempted to do, 
 and the results of their labours are before us. To some 
 these seem convincing, to others tl;ey do not. Of the 
 others, I, in all modesty, claim to be one. 
 
 But were I competent to break a controversial lance 
 with these paladins of unbelief (which I am not), 
 the pages of the Gospel of the Poor would not be the 
 place for so unequal a combat. Suffice it to say that 
 I regard the artless, but vivid narratives of the four 
 Gospels, as genuine first century history, as credible as 
 Caesar's Commentaries, and entirely inexplicable by the 
 " myth " theory or any other hypothesis, except that 
 Jesus was what He affirmed Himself to be, the long- 
 looked for Messiah. The " myth " theory will soon be 
 as discredited as the **sun" theory which preceded it. 
 Twenty Shakespeares rolled into one could not have 
 created Jesus of Nazareth. 
 
 At the same time it is no reproach to these two great 
 Continental scholars that having started on a wrong 
 track the farther they steered along it the more 
 remote became the haven of truth which they earnestly 
 sought. They have, in point of fact, rendered the 
 cause of Christ, which is the cause of Humanity, a 
 most essential service. Theologians in all ages have 
 been far too apt to magnify the Divinity of the Messiah 
 at the expense of His Manhood. They are perpetually 
 to be found looking for a God hidden away in a human 
 form instead of grasping the far more important truth 
 that the Christ submitted Himself to the hard condi- 
 tions of human existence in their entirety. If He 
 worked miracles for others He worked none for Him- 
 self. Hence it was said of Him as He hung on the 
 Cross, " He saved others ; Himself He cannot save." 
 
 Christ was, above all things, the Perfect Man, and it 
 is as such that He can best be contemplated. If I were 
 asked to define my own theological standpoint, I should 
 feel disposed to call in the aid of the Poet Burns rather 
 than that of any ecclesiastical authority or professional 
 creed-maker. In one of his letters to Clarinda, the 
 fllustrious Peasant Bard, who was at bottom of a
 
 98 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 sincerely reverent nature, though he remorselessly slew 
 the foul dragon of Scottish Calvinism, writes : — 
 
 " I will lay before you the outlines of my Belief. 
 He who is our Author and Preserver, and will one day 
 be our Judge, must be (not for His sake in the way of 
 duty but from the native impulse of our hearts) the 
 object of our reverential awe and adoration. He is not 
 willing that any should perish, but that all should come 
 to everlasting life. Consequently, it must be in every- 
 one's power to embrace His offer of ' everlasting life ;' 
 otherwise He could not in justice, condemn those who 
 did not. A mind pervaded, actuated, and governed by 
 purity, truth, and charity, though it does not tnerit 
 Heaven, yet it is an absolutely necessary pre-requisite, 
 without which Heaven can neither be obtained nor en- 
 joyed, and, by Divine promise, such a mind shall never 
 fail of attaining everlasting life ; hence the impure, the 
 deceiving, the uncharitable extrude themselves from 
 eternal bliss by their unfitness for enjoying it. The 
 Supreme Being has put the immediate administration of 
 all this, for wise and good ends known to Himself, into 
 the hands of Jesus Christ, a Great Personage, whose re- 
 lation to Him *we cannot comprehend, but whose relation 
 to us is that of a Guide and Saviour, and who, except for 
 our own obstinacy and misconduct, will bring us all, 
 through various ways and by various means, to bliss at 
 last." 
 
 This rational, manly and hopeful Credo, I venture to 
 affirm, is consonant with the reason and conscience of 
 mankind, and no theologian, priest, or " mahatma " 
 living could rest belief in the Unseen and Eternal on 
 firmer ground. Burns great compassionate nature 
 reached out even to the "puir deil" : — 
 
 •• But fare ye weel. auld Nickie Ben, 
 Oh, wad ye tak' a thocht and men', 
 Ye aiblins micht, I dinna ken, 
 Still hae a stake ; 
 I'm wae to think upon yon den, 
 Even for your sake. 
 
 The Christ was born in the year of Rome, 750. His
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. QQ 
 
 Advent was very generally expected at the time, and 
 even the Pagan world was strangely affected by the 
 tremor of Messianic hope. For five centuries no prophet 
 had appeared in Israel, when John the Baptist's power- 
 ful voice awoke the echoes of the desert. The Fore- 
 runner was a striking figure, as became his august 
 function. From his youth up he had been a Nazarite, 
 that is to say, one on whose head no razor had ever 
 come and who had never tasted any fermented liquor. 
 His food consisted of locusts and wild honey, while his 
 clothing was of camel's hair. ' * Repent y e ; the Kingdom 
 of Heaven is at hand," was the burden of his message. 
 In him was incarnated the spirit of Old Testament 
 prophecy. The multitude was greatly moved by the 
 intense earnestness of his discourses, and the rumour 
 not unnaturally spread abroad that this singular being 
 was He who should come. 
 
 John at once disavowed any such pretension. " There 
 Cometh One after me, the latchet of whose shoes I am 
 not worthy to unloose. I baptize you with water ; but 
 He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with 
 fire." He, John, is only a voice, a witness to the light. 
 *' There standeth One among you whom ye know not. 
 He it is who, coming after me, is preferred before me, 
 for He was before me." 
 
 At this time Jesus and John were young men, probably 
 in their thirtieth year, and unknown to each other from 
 childhood. The Messiah's career had hitherto been 
 wrapped in obscurity. " The child," Luke tells, " grew 
 and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the 
 grace of God was upon Him." This would of course 
 strike His mother, though it seems to have impressed 
 few besides. His kinsfolk and the companions of His 
 youth were hardest of all to convince of His Divine 
 mission. Yet, as Irenseus beautifully says, " He sancti- 
 fied childhood by passing through it," in unstained 
 innocence and humility. 
 
 The veil of his boyhood is but once lifted, when at 
 twelve years of age he astonished the Temple Doctors 
 of the Law by the profundity of the questions he ad*
 
 100 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 dressed to them ; but from that hour to His baptism by 
 John— a period of eighteen years — His record is a 
 strange blank. 
 
 That event marked the opening of Christ's public 
 career. When He presented Himself to John for the 
 performance of this rite of purification, the Baptist 
 hesita ted. He vaguely felt himself in the presence of the 
 Master, of Him that was to come. " I have need to be 
 baptised of Thee, and cometh Thou to me ?" " Thus it 
 becometh us to fulfil all righteousness," was the meek 
 reply. 
 
 When the ceremony was over and the voice from 
 Heaven had proclaimed in his ears, " This is my 
 beloved Son in whom I am well pleased," — then only did 
 it fully dawn on the Forerunner that he was in the actual 
 presence of Him whose speedy advent he had announced 
 in the wilderness. And what more natural than the 
 expression which rose to his lips, " 1 knew Him not." 
 
 Even Mohammed calls Jesus the " Sinless Prophet." 
 Why, then, it has been asked, should He submit to any 
 symbolic form of purification ? Simply because, as 
 has been said, He accepted without qualification all the 
 conditions of our common humanity, including those 
 peculiar to His time and country. He was a man, and, 
 like other men shared man's spirtual as well as physical 
 needs. Just as He hungered and thirsted so He prayed, 
 and was himself anointed by John for the Divine work of 
 human regeneration on which He was about to enter. 
 
 Next day John again met Jesus, and, to the two dis* 
 ciples who were with him he bore the solemn testimony, 
 " Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins 
 of the world." When Jesus perished on Calvary, the 
 entire sacrificial system of the Jews became a mean* 
 ingless anachronism.
 
 tHE GOSfEL OF tHfi POOR. 10 
 
 No. XIX. 
 
 THE TEMPTATION. 
 
 Once upo n a time the fishes of a certain river took counsel together 
 and said, " They tell us that our life and being is from the water, 
 but we have never seen water, and know not what it is." Then 
 some among them wiser than the rest, said, " We have heard that 
 there dwelleth in the sea a very wise and learned fish who knowcth 
 all things ; let us journey to him, and ask him to show us water, or 
 to explain to us what it is." So several of them set out upon their 
 travels, and at last came to the sea wherein the sage fish resided. 
 On hearing their request he answered them thus : — 
 
 Oh, ye who seek to solve the knot, 
 
 Ye live in God, yet know him not. 
 
 Ye sit upon the river's brink, 
 
 Yet crave in vain a drop to drink. 
 
 Ye dwell beside a countless store. 
 
 Yet perish hungry at the door.— Sun (Palmer.). 
 
 In the market place lay a dead dog. Of the group gathered around 
 it, one said, " This carcase is disgusting." Another said, " The 
 sight of it is torment." Every man spoke in this strain. But Jesus 
 drew near and said, " Pearls are not equal in whiteness to his teeth " 
 Look not on the failures of others and the merits of thyself; cast 
 thine eye on thine own fault. — Nizami (Persian). 
 
 Before passing from the Baptism of Christ to His 
 Temptation in the wilderness, it may be well to glance 
 at the doubt that unquestionably arose in the mind of 
 the imprisoned Baptist, whether after all Jesus was 
 the Messiah, He that should come. From his cell in the 
 gloomy fortress of Machero, in the wild and savage 
 country to the east of the Dead Sea, John dispatched two 
 of his disciples to question Jesus about His mission : — 
 
 And when the men were come unto Him, they said : John the 
 Baptist hath sent us onto thee, saying, Art thou He that cometh, or 
 look we for another ?
 
 102 THE GOSPEL OP THE POOR. 
 
 Here at first sight is a singular enigma. When John 
 baptised Jesus he explicitly recognized the Nazarene as 
 the Messiah. Why, then, this note of interrogation ? 
 But John, be it remembered, was essentially an Old 
 Testament Prophet who looked for a speedy and glorious 
 manifestation on the part of Him that was to come. 
 The idea of a crucified or suffering Christ would 
 doubtless have been as staggering to John as it was to the 
 great mass of the Jewish people. His conception of the 
 Kingdom of Heaven corresponded but faintly with that 
 which Jesus actually inaugurated. Christ was neither 
 offended nor surprised at John's misgivings, but His 
 response was conclusive. 
 
 In that hour He cured many of diseases, and plagues, and evil 
 spirits ; and on many that were bli •'.d He bestowed sight. 
 
 And he answered, and said unto them : Go your way and tell 
 John what things ye have seen and heard ; the blind receive their 
 sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, 
 the dead are raised up, the poor have good tidings preached to 
 them. — Luke vn., 20, 21, 22. 
 
 Such were the fruits of the Kingdom of God on earth. 
 The grand distinguishing mark of the Messiah is not 
 even mighty works of healing. It is : '• The poor have 
 the Gospel (glad tidings) preached to them." Whether 
 Christ's reply to John ever reached the Forerunner is 
 not recorded, but it may be permissible to hope that it 
 did, and that it consoled and reassured that ardent and 
 heroic soul in his last moments on eartli. 
 
 Be that as it may, the tribute which the Messiah 
 paid to John is the noblest on record : 
 
 And when the messengers of John were departed, He began to 
 say unto the multitude concerning John, What went ye out into the 
 wilderness to behold ? A reed shaken v.'ith the wind ? 
 
 But what went ye out to see ? A man clothed in soft raiment ? 
 Behold, they which are gorgeously appareled, and live delicately 
 are in Kings' Courts. 
 
 But what went ye out to see ? A prophet ? Yea, I say unto you 
 more than a prophet. 
 
 This is he of whom it is written. Behold, I send my messenger 
 before Thy face, who shall prepare the way before Thee. 
 
 I say unto you among them that are born of women there is none 
 greater than John ; yet he that is but little in the Kingdom of God 
 is greater than he. — Luke vn., 24, 25, 26, 27, 28.
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR, 10^ 
 
 In Other words, though none exceeded John in moral 
 grandeur, he could not cross the boundary line which 
 separates the moral atmosphere of the Old Testament 
 from that of the New. He groped in comparative dark- 
 ness, and his sun finally went down ere it was yet noon; 
 but the Master's commendation was enough, and more 
 than enough to compensate him for all his suffer- 
 ings : '* Verily, I say unto you, among those that are 
 born of women there hath not arisen a greater than John 
 the Baptist." John was, in a special sense, the first 
 Christian martyr, the first witness to the New Faith. 
 
 If we ascribe impeccability to Christ the entire 
 narrative of the Temptation becomes unintelligible. 
 His humanity is no more real. It is an illusion, and 
 being no more like unto us He is no more ours. Truth 
 to tell, Jesus was intensely human, and the real signi- 
 ficance of the story of the terrible spiritual struggle 
 which He endured when He " was led of the Spirit 
 into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil " appears 
 to me to be this : 
 
 Up till this period of His career He had led a life of 
 pure instinctive innocence, under the most favourable 
 conditions, in beautiful Galilee of the Gentiles. He now 
 for the first time was brought face to face with the 
 terrible problem which every great soul sooner or later 
 has to settle in the innermost recess of consciousness : 
 Am I to serve myself or my fellow-men, good or evil, 
 God or the Devil ? Instinctive goodness is not un- 
 common, but the goodness of deliberate choice is rare, 
 and it not unfrequently happens that the best natures 
 fare worst in these painful combats of the free will. 
 Corruptio optimi pessima. When Christ was tempted in 
 the wilderness, He was already fully conscious of the 
 extraordinary powers with which He was gifted. 
 Were He but to say, "Evil be thou my good," a 
 dazzling vision of empire and worldly power, pomp, 
 and pleasure at once rose before His eyes. He might 
 as a Great Prince restore the regal glories of David 
 and Solomon, or like another Alexander set about the 
 conquest of the whole earth. The Jews looked for a
 
 104 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 deliverer of the type of Maccabaeus, the Hammer, and 
 mif^ht He not be that Hammer ? 
 
 We know how Napoleon and even Cromwell acted 
 in like circumstances. They fell. Christ rose, and 
 rose on the same wings of trust in God and Man on 
 which the most degraded may mount above their baser 
 selves. 
 
 I hold it truth, with him who sings 
 
 To one clear harp in diverse tones, 
 
 That men may rise on stepping-stones 
 
 Of their dead selves to nobler things. 
 
 The most trying moments of Christ's life were not 
 those spent on Calvary. They were passed at the 
 beginning of His public career in the Judean desett, 
 and, at its close, in the Garden of Gethsemene, when 
 He prayed that, if it were possible, the cup which He 
 was so soon to drain to the dregs might pass from Him. 
 Many martyrs have deliberately expedited their own 
 martyrdom. Not so Jesus. He would gladly have 
 escaped the ordeal of the Cross had there been an 
 alternative ; but as there was none, '• He learned 
 obedience," as it is written in Hebrews, end, unscathed 
 underwent the perilous freedom of moral choice which, 
 in some form or other, awaits all men and nations. 
 
 Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide. 
 In the strife of truth with falsehood for the good or evil side. 
 Some cause God's great Messiah offering each the bloom or blight, 
 Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right. 
 And the choice goes by for ever 'twixt that darkness and that light. 
 
 It is clear that the story of the Temptation in the 
 wilderness is not to be taken literally. The "exceed- 
 ing high mountain " from which all the kingdoms of 
 the world were visible does not exist and never did 
 exist. But the meaning of the vision, or whatever the 
 phenomena of the Temptation may really have been, is 
 plain enough. The Messiah was not tempted as 
 ordinary men are tempted. He was tempted as the 
 Messiah. Would He be God's Messiah or the devil's ? 
 Would He use His miraculous powers on His own 
 account, for His own selfish ends or for the good of all 
 mankind ? " If Thou be the Son of God, command 
 
 I
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. I05 
 
 that these stones be made bread." In other words, 
 Thou art hungry, therefore use Thy divine power over 
 material phenomena to fill Thine own empty stomach. 
 Do not work beneficent miracles of healing, whispered 
 the tempter. Work useless prodigies that will dazzle 
 the multitude. Leap scatheless from a pinnacle of the 
 Temple in the sight of all the people, and they will 
 make of Thee a King. " All this power and glory will 
 I give Thee if Thou wilt fall down and worship me ; " 
 that is to say, if thou wilt cast aside this foolish im- 
 practicable ideal of a Kingdom of God on earth, and 
 substitute selfishness for love of God and man. 
 
 The '• Kingdom " for which nearly all Christ's con- 
 temporaries looked was precisely similar to that which 
 floated before the Messiah's ej-es in the great Tempta- 
 tion in the wilderness. The Alexandrine Jewish Sybil 
 depicts the Messiah as girt with a terrible brand before 
 which every foe quails. He is also a mighty wonder- 
 worker, and Judea is the theatre of his brilliant achieve- 
 ments. And, as a matter of fact, Christ was oftener 
 than once in actual danger of being proclaimed an 
 earthly King against His will. After the miracle of 
 the five barley loaves and the two fishes — 
 
 When the people saw the sign which He did, they said^: This is of 
 a truth the Prophet that cometh into the world. 
 
 Tesus, therefore, perceiving that they were about to come and 
 take Him by force to make Him King, withdrew again into the 
 mountain Himself alone. — John vi., 14, 15. 
 
 The Temptation in the wilderness was therefore no 
 chimeia, but perhaps the most decisive turning-point 
 in the whole history of humanity. When Christ de- 
 liberately rejected the Jewish conception of an Imperial 
 Messiah, He must have clearly discerned that in re- 
 jecting a Throne He was courting a Cross. " No man 
 (He said) taketh my life from Me, but I lay it down of 
 Myself." It was in the wilderness of Judea that He 
 laid it down.
 
 Io6 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 No. XX. 
 
 THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 
 
 One night, Gabriel, from his seat in Paradise, heard the voice of 
 God sweetly responding to a human heart. The angel said, "Surely 
 this must be an eminent servant of the Most High, whose spirit is 
 dead to lust and lives on high." The angel hastened over land and sea 
 to find this man, but could not find him in the earth or heavens. 
 At last he exclaimed, " O Lord ! show me the way to this object of 
 Thy love." God answered, "Turn thy steps to yon village, 
 and in that pagoda thou shalt behold him." The angel sped to the 
 pagoda, and therein found a solitary man kneeling before an idol. 
 Returning, he cried, " O Master of the World ! hast Thou looked 
 with love on a man who invokes an idol in a pagoda?" God said, 
 " I consider not the error of ignorance; this heart, amid its dark- 
 ness, hath the highest place." — Attar (Persian). 
 
 Tsze-Kung asked, saying, " What do you say of a man who is 
 loved by all the people in his village ? " Confucius answered, " We 
 may not for that accord our approval of him. ' "And what do you 
 say of him who is hated by all the people of his village ? " The 
 Master said, " We may not for that conclude that he is bad. It is 
 better than either of these cases that the good in the village love 
 him and the bad hate him." — Confucius' Analects. 
 
 So to the calmly gathered thought 
 The innermost of Truth is taught, 
 The mystery dimly understood 
 That love of God is love of Good, 
 And chiefly its divinest trace 
 In Him of Nazareth's holy face ; 
 That to be saved is only this — 
 Salvation from our selfishness ; 
 That worship's deeper meaning lies 
 In mercy and not sacrifice. — Whittier. 
 
 The forty terrible days of inward struggle in the 
 wilderness over, the Messiah emerged having " over*
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. I07 
 
 come the world " «.«., " the prince " (or controlling prin- 
 ciple} of the world ; viz., selfishness. " The seed of the 
 woman " had completely triumphed at last in the entire 
 self-renunciation of Jesus. The Son of Man had even 
 received " power to forgive sins " and to " save to the 
 uttermost " all other sons of men who should follow in 
 His footsteps and worship God (the Good) in spirit and 
 in truth to the annihilation of self-love in their 
 hearts. 
 
 Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on Me, the works 
 that I do shall he do also ; and greater works than these shall he do, 
 because I go to the Father. — St. John xiv., 12. 
 
 Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall 
 be bound in heaven, and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall 
 be loosed in heaven. — Matt, xviii., 18. 
 
 Jesus, the Messiah, was indeed the Man of Men. 
 He identified Himself with Humanity in the most 
 explicit manner possible. He was actually at greater 
 pains to affirm his humanity than his divinity. He 
 recognised Man's dual nature — Son of Man, Son of God 
 — and affirmed that perfection was within his reach 
 here and now. 
 
 Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father who is in heaven is 
 perfect.— Matt, v., 48. 
 
 Beloved, let us love one another ; for love is of God ; and every 
 one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. 
 
 He that loveth not knoweth not God ; for God is love. 
 
 In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that 
 God sent His only begotten son into the world that we might live 
 through him. 
 
 And we have known and believed the love which God hath to us. 
 God is love, and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God 
 in him. — i John iv., 7, 8, 9, 16. 
 
 In the wilderness Jesus once and for all put aside self 
 which is Satanic, and embraced love, which is Divine, 
 as his guiding principle of action, and, inasmuch as 
 •* sin had no dominion over him," therefore is He 
 abundantly qualified to *' help those that are tempted." 
 Wliere the first Adam had failed the second Adam had 
 triumphed, and thus became the true Saviour of man- 
 kind. His thoughts, words, and deeds, were begotten 
 of the Divine Love that burned unconsumably in His
 
 I08 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 own oul, and therefore did He say with sublime con- 
 fidence, " X and My Father are One." 
 
 But though the Messiah was sinless and therefore 
 Divine — " one with the Father " — being still seed of 
 the woman, Son of Man, He never for a moment laid 
 claim either to omnipotence or omniscience on earth. 
 As to the former : — 
 
 He saith unto them, ye shall drink, indeed, of my cup . . . but to sit 
 on my right hand, and on my left is not mine to give, but it is given 
 to them for whom it is prepared of my Father. — Matt, xx, 23. 
 
 Verily, verily, I say unto you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, 
 but what He seeth the Father do ; for what things soever He doeth, 
 these also the Son doeth likewise. — John, v., 19. 
 
 As to the latter : — 
 
 Heaven and earth shall pass away ; but My words shall not pass 
 away. 
 
 But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no not even the 
 angels in Heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. — Mark xiii., 
 31. 32. 
 
 In other words, though Jesus, in the domain of religion 
 was, and is the infalHble Guide of Humanity, He did not, 
 at a bound, attain to a complete knowledge of the Divine 
 purpose or method. Being Son of Man, and therefore 
 subject to the law of development, it is not difficult to 
 mark successive stages of progression in His spiritual 
 conceptions. But imperfect knowledge is not a 
 synonym for error. «• Truth," says Schleiermacher, 
 " is the natural heritage of man ; his faculties in 
 their normal condition ought to lead him to it. 
 The state of ignorance or uncertainty is not error ; 
 the latter commences the moment the mind has arrived 
 at a false conclusion ; for, in order to do this, it must 
 have Btopped too soon in its search after truth, and 
 consequently must either have been wanting in its love, 
 which truth deserves, or must have had a sectet interest 
 in accepting an incomplete result. It is not then 
 possible to distinguish absolutely between error and 
 sin, at least in relation to that order of truths which 
 address themselves to the conscience and the soul. If 
 it is fhus with man in his normal condition, with how 
 much stronger reason may we attribute this infallibility
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. IO9 
 
 to Jesus, who presents to us the highest ideal of 
 humanity. With a mind upright and pure, He dis- 
 cerned religious truth as it was reflected in Holy 
 Scripture, in nature, and most of all, in Himself, the 
 most perfect mirror of things divine. All He needed, 
 then, was to arrive at the full consciousness of His own 
 being." 
 
 Such then was Jesus of Nazareth according to His 
 own showing. He claimed to be the sinless Messiah, 
 Son of Man, Son of God, and to be divinely com- 
 missioned to set up his Father's Kingdom upon earth. 
 Love was that Father's supreme attribute, a love 
 immeasurably surpassing that of all earthly fathers, and 
 from man He asks for nothing but love, perfect love 
 towards God and man. His religion was summed up in 
 two precepts of marvellous simplicity : — 
 
 Then one of them, who was a lawyer, asked him a question, 
 tempting him, and saying. 
 
 Master, which is the great commandment in the Law ? 
 
 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all 
 hy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. 
 
 This is the first and great Commandment. 
 
 And the second is like unto it : — Thou shalt love thy neighbour 
 as thyself. 
 
 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.— 
 Matt, xxu., 35, 36, 37. 38. 39. 40. 
 
 This, the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood 
 of Man, is indeed a small programme, but never 
 assuredly was there one propounded for fallible man's 
 adoption more arduous. It is, in truth, a most exacting 
 Credo, and professing Christians in all ages have taken 
 refuge in this baleful theology and in that to escape 
 from its obligations. But it has lived them down one 
 after the other, and will continue to live them down until 
 the final triumph of the Christ is accomplished. — 
 
 And when all things shall be subdued unto Him [Christl then shall 
 the Son al.so himself be subject unto Him that put all things under 
 Him that God may be all in all. — L Cor., xv., 28.
 
 no THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 NO. XXI. 
 
 CONCEPTION OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 
 
 There is no unbelief ; 
 Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod 
 And waits to see it push away the clod, 
 He trusts in God. 
 
 Whoever says when clouds are in the sky. 
 Be patient, heart : light breaketh by-and-by, 
 Trusts the Most High. 
 
 Whoever sees, 'neath winter's field of snow, 
 The silent harvest of the future grow, 
 God's power must know. 
 
 Wheever lies down on his couch to sleep, 
 Content to lock each sense in slumber deep, 
 Knows God will keep. 
 
 Whoever says, " To-morrow," " The Unknown," 
 " The Future." trusts that Power alone 
 He dares disown. 
 
 The heart that looks on when the eyelids close. 
 And dares to live when life has only woes 
 God's comfort knows. 
 
 There is no unbelief ; 
 And day by day. and night unconsciously, 
 The heart lives by that faith the lips deny — 
 God knoweth why. 
 
 Edward Bulwer Lviton. 
 
 Were His blameless feet 
 To-day within our streets, methinks men's doubts 
 Would chafe Him little, and His hand would grasp 
 The hand of many an outcast from the fold 
 That boasts Hira shepherd, and His test of love 
 Would turn much dross to gold, much gold to dross. 
 
 Alfred Haybs
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 1X1 
 
 •»< Jesus," says R6nan, with much insight, " was the 
 Man who believed most thoroughly in the reality of the 
 ideal." Indeed to Him the ideal was the real. The 
 Kingdom of Heaven was within men, not outside 
 them. 
 
 It was first of all for guileless children,' and such as 
 resembled them in innocence and simplicity. To be- 
 come again a little child in feeling, qualified for admission 
 into the Kingdom. 
 
 Secondly, it was for the poor in this world's goods 
 without regard to the cause of their Poverty. He drew 
 no distinction between the " deserving " and the 
 " undeserving " poor, and indeed, He Himself with His 
 vagrant life, as was very wittily shown in a recent 
 number of the Church Reformer, could not have stood 
 one of the tests laid down by our precious Charity 
 Organisation Society. 
 
 Thirdly, the Kingdom was for all manner of social 
 failures ; harlots, publicans, prodigal sons, theives on 
 the cross and such like disreputable persons, being 
 truly humble and penitent. 
 
 Fourthly, the Kingdom was for all manner of heretics : 
 Samaritans, pagans of Tyre and Sidon, Sabbath- 
 breakers and persons generally in bad religious odour. 
 
 It is the rich, the fashionable, the respectable, the 
 " unco' guid " that are alone excluded from the Kingdom 
 of God, whose foundations He laid on earth. Nor does 
 He exclude them. He invites them, but they exclude 
 themselves, The parable of the "great supper" is 
 singularly delightful : — 
 
 Then said He unto him, A certain man made a great supper and 
 bade many : And sent his servant at supper-time to say to them 
 that were bidden, Come ; for all things are now r«ady. 
 
 And they all with one consent began to make excuse. The first 
 said unto him, I have bought a piece of ground and I must needs go 
 and see it ; I pray thee have me excused. 
 
 And another said, I have bought five yoke of oxen and I go to 
 prove them ; I pray thee have me excused. 
 
 And another said, I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot 
 come. 
 
 So that servant came and shewed his lord these things. Then 
 the master of the house, being angry, said to his servant, Go out
 
 112 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 quickly into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in hither tho 
 poor, and the maimed, and the halt and the blind. 
 
 And the servant said, Lord it is done as thou hast commanded, 
 and yet there is room. 
 
 And the lord said unto the servant. Go out into the highways aod 
 hedges and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled. 
 
 For I say unto you. That none of those men which were biddea 
 shall taste of my supper. — Luke xiv. 16-24 
 
 Mark who were the persons debarred, or rather who 
 debarred themselves, the supper chamber. 
 
 First came the greatest author of economic wrong, the 
 private Landlord. He could not come because he had 
 his rents to collect, rack-rented tenants to evict, crofters 
 to drive into the arid region around the Dead Sea, or 
 to swell the multitude of unemployed in the streets and 
 lanes of the East End of Jerusalem and Caesarea 
 Phillippi. 
 
 Next came the CapUalist intent on money-making 
 and labour-sweating. He did not mean to do any 
 honest ploughing himself with the five yoke of oxen. 
 Not he! He meant to get some Hebrew Hodges, or 
 any stray Gibeonites he could impress into that service. 
 These he would keep at work from dawn till dusk, feed 
 on the coarsest fare, and house in hovels worse than 
 pigsties. With the grain thus raised he would go up 
 to Jerusalem, at the proper season, and enter into a 
 conspiracy with a few other greedy rascals like himself 
 to starve and rob the Jerusalemites by forming a 
 •' corner" in corn. He was too absorbed in this con- 
 genial devil's work even to celebrate the rites of 
 hospitality at the invitation of an open-handed and 
 open-hearted host. 
 
 Lastly came the selfish "family man," who systemati- 
 cally set the supposed interests of wife and weans above 
 those of the community at large. This very respectable 
 person never troubled himself about politics, never voted 
 at elections, never read the Jerusalem Daily Chfonich 
 prided himself in fact on discharging none of the duties 
 of a good citizen, so much was he absorbed in the 
 arduous task of be-decking and be-jewelling his sensuous 
 wife, and laying up a fortune for hopeful young " Mr.
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. II3 
 
 Abingdon " when he should come of age and go to 
 Rome to aid Nero in his orgies. 
 
 Next mark the persons not so much invited to the 
 supper as compelled to come in. The streets and the 
 lanes are to be scoured for the victims of the landlord, 
 the capitalist, and the selfish " family man." The rural 
 landlord has driven them off what he has been pleased 
 to call his land, and they have been perforce obliged to 
 take refuge in the " slums " of Jerusalem. Here they 
 find themselves confronted by the urban landlord, a yet 
 more oppressive personage. The rent of their *' slum " 
 is rendered fabulous by Hebrew Westminsters, Bed- 
 fords, Cadogans, and other vampires. Many of them 
 are entirely homeless, and sleep under arches, in cellars, 
 and in holes unknown to Hieroslymite Robert. Those 
 of them who are able to obtain any work receive very 
 little wages, because the capitalist employer has a whole 
 " reserve army of labour " standing idle in the market- 
 place ready to take their place the moment they show 
 any disposition to lay claim to their due. All these off- 
 scourings of street and lane are therefore bidden to the 
 supper. 
 
 It is next poor Hodge's turn. The highways and the 
 hedges of rural Judea must be raided by " Red Vans," 
 and as Hodge is very ignorant — having been purposely 
 kept in mental darkness for many centuries by those 
 who have iniquitously ** laid field to field and house 
 \o house" in collusion with the Priest, the Scribe, and 
 the Levite — to him a little gentle.' compulsion has to 
 be applied. 
 
 But the supper-chamber is filled at last with this 
 motley crowd, in which there is neither Saducee nor 
 Pharisee, nor any ** respectable member of society ; " 
 and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven ! 
 
 Need I illustrate the composition of the Kingdom 
 further ? Were I to do so, it would be to stamp with 
 approval some of the legislative proposals of the present 
 Government, especially the Parish Councils Bill, as 
 the most efficacious and courageous steps that have yet 
 been taken to seat the poor and friendless at the " great
 
 114 "T^^ GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 supper," with the squire and the parson left severely 
 out. 
 
 The parable of Dives and Lazarus is yet more re- 
 markable. Dives has been called the " wicked, rich 
 man," but without the slightest justification. The best 
 exegesis by far that I have seen is contained in a 
 little volume, entitled " Dives and Pauper," by the Vicar 
 of Lucton, Arthur Compton Auchmuty. He points out 
 that it is not the sin of uncharitableness that is con- 
 demned by the parable, but the sin of being rich at all. 
 
 In point of fact, Dives was an easy-going, self-indul- 
 gent millionaire. We do not read that he refused to 
 let Lazarus have the goodly crumbs that fell in such 
 abundance from his table, and he certainly allowed his 
 hounds to lick the poor sufferer's sores. If Dives had 
 been a " gentleman of England," it is perfectly safe to 
 affirm that Lazarus would never have got " within a 
 measurable distance" of his gate, inasmuch as the dogs 
 would have been sent to frighten the vagrant away. 
 But Christ recognised, all the same, that being a million- 
 aire he habitually reaped what he had not sown, or, in 
 other words, that he was a robber, and that till he and. 
 his entire class were abolished there could be no true 
 Kingdom of God on Earth. We are not told how 
 Dives acquired his wealth, but it was certainly not by 
 honest industry. " Opulence," truly says St. Jerome, 
 "is always the product of theft committed, if not by 
 the actual possessor, then by his ancestors." 
 
 And such, doubtless, was the judgment of the 
 Messiah: " Woe unto you that are rich, for ye have 
 received your consolation." There is but one way for 
 you to pass into the Kingdom. Sell whatever you have 
 and distribute among those you have helped to nn- 
 poverish. That is your only chance; but, alas, alas ! 
 " it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye 
 than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven." 
 The rich are often charitable, but seldom or never just, 
 and mere charity will not, cannot save them. By them 
 the great lessons, " Be just before you are generous," 
 •* Prevention is better than cure," are read in vain.
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. II5 
 
 They "go away sorrowful, because they have great 
 possessions." 
 
 The terrible simile of the camel and the needle's eye 
 was staggering even to the disciples. But yet if one 
 reflects on it it is not so strange. It would be an incon- 
 ceivable Heaven here or hereafter in which, say, Jay 
 Gould or Colonel North, should find himself at home. 
 In the very best natures, by the law of compensation 
 which runs through all things, riches produce an a p- 
 palling coldness of heart and involve their possessor in 
 countless temptations unknown to the honest toiler. 
 Hence it is the duty, the positive duty, of a Christian 
 community, so to legislate as to divest the rich oJ 
 all the superfluous wealth which now hopelessly dis- 
 qnahfies them from entering the Kingdom of God on 
 Earth, and from singing with William Blake : — 
 
 I will not cease from mental fight, 
 Nor let my sword sleep in my hand, 
 Till we have built Jerusalem, 
 In England's green and pleasant land.
 
 Il6 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 No. XXII. 
 
 THE "KINGDOM OF GOD" AND THE "WORLD." 
 
 Jesus of Nazareth who was a prophet mighty in deed and word 
 before God and aU the people. — Luke xxiv., 19. 
 
 Immortal by their deed and word, 
 
 Like light around them shed. 
 Still speak the Prophets of the Lord, 
 
 Still live the sainted dead. 
 
 The voice of old by Jordan's flooc* 
 
 Yet floats upon the air ; 
 We hear it in beatitude. 
 
 In parable and prayer. 
 
 And still the beauty of that life 
 
 Shines star-like on our way 
 And breathes its calm amid the strife 
 
 And burden of to-day. 
 
 Earnest of life for evermore, 
 
 That life of duty here — 
 The trust that in the darkest hour 
 Looked forth and knew no fear. 
 
 Spirit of Jesus, still speed on ! 
 
 Speed on Thy conquering way. 
 Till every heart the Father own, 
 
 And all His will obey. — F. L. HosMER. 
 
 The Magna Charta of the Kingdom of God, whose 
 immoveable foundations Jesus laid on Earth, is the 
 Sermon on the Mount. Of all recorded utterances it 
 is immeasurably the most memorable. It constituted 
 a revolution in the realm of thought so fundamental 
 that its ulterior consequences are still discernable only 
 in the dim and distant future of mankind.
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. II7 
 
 Gracious as are the Beatitudes in every line ; yet 
 are they the sternest declaration of war against the 
 " world " and all its works. They subverted the very 
 ideals of manhood by which the world both of Jew 
 and Gentile was governed. An entirely new concep- 
 tion of what is noblest in life and character was given 
 to humanity — a conception henceforth ineradicable 
 from the soul of man. Christ fulfilled the Law and 
 the Prophets by supplementing them in a manner 
 never dreamt of by Saducee, Scribe, or Pharisee. The 
 Pharisee multiplied outward observances, the better 
 to escape the obligation of inner rectitude. He 
 eschewed the act of murder, but hated his neighbour. 
 To him Christ said : — 
 
 Therefore, if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there remem- 
 berest that thy brother hath aught against thee ; 
 
 Leave there thy gift before the altar and go thy way ; first be 
 reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift. — 
 Matt. v. 23, 24. 
 
 Similarly, in regard to incontinence Christ went 
 straight from deed to thought. 
 
 Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt 
 not commit adultery : 
 
 But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust 
 after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. — 
 Matt. v. 27, 28. 
 
 The Mosaic Code condemned perjury ; Christ con- 
 demned untruthfulness in every form : — 
 
 Swear not at all. 
 
 Let your communication be, Yea, Yea; Nay, Nay; for what- 
 soever is more than these cometh of evil. — Matt. v. 34-37. 
 
 And now we come to the distinctive precept of the 
 Christian Faith, which is summed up in the three 
 momentous words : Resist not evil : — 
 
 Ye have heard that it hath been said. An eye for an eye and 
 tooth for a tooth : 
 
 But I say unto you. That ye resist uot evil ; but whosoever shall 
 smite thee on the right clieek, turn to him the other also. 
 
 And if any man will sue thee at the Jaw, and take away thy coat, 
 let him have thy cloak also. 
 
 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. 
 
 Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of 
 thee turn not thou away. — Matt, v., 38, 39, 40, 41.
 
 Il8 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 " Resist not evil ! I abrogate, nay, flatly reverse, 
 the entire Lex Talionis by which the world has hitherto 
 been governed. There are to be no more soldiers, no 
 more policeman, no more lawyers, no more private 
 property." Such were the astounding announcements 
 from the Mount — more astounding by far in the domain 
 of the ethical than aught set down as " miracle " or 
 •• sign " in that of the physical. 
 
 But yet once admit that the institution of private 
 property is mere organized selfishness — embodied '• covet- 
 ousness " — and the rest follows as a matter of course. 
 I am aware that most "divines" and commentators 
 wriggle hard to identify Christ with the support of this, 
 the basic principle of the " world," whicih it was His 
 mission to overthrow, but without avail. The Messiah 
 clearly taught that all things should be accumulated, 
 owned, and used in common, as every one had need, 
 just as air, sunlight, and the boundless sea are 
 common. 
 
 The word " Catholic " (Kata holos) was unknown to 
 Jesus and His Apostles. The word "Common" 
 (Koinos) is the key to all His teachings, social and 
 spiritual. Christ, in point of fact, rigorously condemned 
 whatever is known to jurists as " Acquired Rights," and 
 substituted for them the " Natural Rights of Man," 
 which need no " Law and Order " to support them. A 
 simple " Yea, Yea : Nay, Nay," amply sufficeth. 
 
 It has been said that He did not even expressly 
 condemn slavery ; but if He condemned private pro- 
 perty in toto He necessarily proscribed the chattel 
 slavery which was its corner-stone in the ancient 
 world. 
 
 And with the abolition of private property the trade 
 of soldier and lawyer — at all times flagitious — for the 
 first time in the world's history, became meaningless. 
 Nay, Kings and Queens, *' Sovereigns and Statesmen," 
 judges and magistrates, admirals and generals, police- 
 men, jailers and hangmen — in a word, the whole super- 
 incumbent paraphernaha of" law and order" fell flat to 
 the ground, a heap of dust and ashes. In a Communistic
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. llg 
 
 State the occupation of the whole of these would be 
 hopelessly gone. 
 
 The reason is plain. They all exist for the purpose 
 of bolstering up the property of the rich. The poor in 
 reality know nothing of the law except its penalties and 
 exactions. If a merciful Providence were to " remove " 
 the whole tribe of the workers' pastors and masters 
 to-morrow, a terrible incubus would be lifted off their 
 shoulders. 
 
 What is a soldier but a murderer hired by the wealthy 
 to defend or acquire for them that which does not right- 
 fully belong to them ? What are our dragoons and 
 marines about at Hull at this moment?* Coercing 
 Labour in the interest of Capital ! Could the '* Masses " 
 have a better object-lesson in the true significance of our 
 standing armies and bloated armaments ? We were 
 thanking God the other day that we did not, like our 
 American kinsmen, employ ** Pinkertons " in such 
 odious enterprises. But to-day our rulers are doing 
 worse. They are wantonly terrorising an industrious 
 and peaceful population by crack national troops 
 recruited from, and paid by, the '• masses " them- 
 selves. 
 
 It 'S long since old Minister Necker saw through the 
 so-called "rights of property" and its defenders: 
 " What do your laws of proper iy, they (the toilers) might 
 say, concern us ? " We own nothing ! Your laws of 
 justice? We have nothing to defend! Your laws of 
 liberty ? If we do not labour to-morrow we shall 
 die! ' 
 
 But if the soldier and policeman are hired to defend 
 private property by violence and legalised murder, the 
 lawyer is even better rewarded for tlie exercise of craft 
 and fraud in the same cause. In litigation, ninety-nine 
 cases out of a hundred grow out of the foetid soil of 
 private property. Inheritance and bequest, contract 
 and crime, the grand sources of litigation are all medi- 
 ately or immediately rooted in private property. 
 
 * This was written at the time of the Hull Stvike. 
 
 I
 
 120 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 Abolish that accursed institution, and the lawyer, with 
 all his "quiddets, cases, tenures, and tricks," will be 
 withered up like Jonah's gourd, and his vast tomes of 
 statute and case law will have about the same sort of 
 interest for mankind as mediaeval treatises on astrology 
 or the black art. 
 
 The serious question remains to be considered. Can 
 any man who accepts the Christian Faith intelligently 
 become either soldier or lawyer ? Frankly, 1 think not. 
 To the Christian both professions are prohibited. 
 They are the main props of this " world," and therefore 
 the chief impediments to the advent of the " Kingdom 
 of God." They represent respectively force and craft, 
 and are utterly repugnant to the spirit and regenerative 
 purpose of Christianity. " He that taketh the sword 
 shall perish by the sword." " Woe unto you lawyers, 
 for ye have taken away the key of KnoAvledge." On 
 these precepts of the Master the early Christians acted 
 implicitly. Like Him, they paid taxes to the Roman 
 authority to avoid giving offence, but in no other way 
 did they recognise it. They avoided alike Caesar's 
 cohorts and his tribunals. They never had recourse to 
 any temporal penalties to enforce the law of Christian 
 brotherhood. The Church was a complete fraternity, 
 having " all things in common." The only law that 
 obtained was the law of love. In the Imperial world 
 they were not of it. They had no use for the Roman 
 Government, which hated them accordingly and perse- 
 cuted them as "enemies of the human race," just as 
 their Master had predicted. The primitive Church of 
 Christ was a perfect inpeviiim in imperio, and bade fair at 
 first to leaven the entire lump of cruel, concupiscent 
 Imperialism. 
 
 But where fire and faggot had ignominously failed, 
 Imperial cunning in the person of Constantine eventu- 
 ally succeeded. That vile murderer of wife, son, and 
 nephew craftily "nobbled " nascent Christianity, and by 
 a series of politic strokes converted the "Communion 
 of the Saints " (the practice of communism) into a 
 worship of Mammon as gross and more hypocritical
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. I2t 
 
 than that which distinguished the superseded pagan 
 culte. 
 
 Howbeit the end is not yet. Christ's ideals of Hfe are 
 to-day perhaps better understood than they have been 
 at any time since the ApostoHc age. The Sun of 
 Nazareth has not yet reached the zenith, but the 
 morning is fast breaking into day.
 
 122 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 No. XXIII. 
 
 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 
 
 His Kingdom slowly dawns upon the earth. 
 
 Far off we see and hail the coming day, 
 
 And cheer us in the twilight with its joy. 
 
 Amidst the din of wars and strife of men, 
 
 The rotting pools of crime and ignorance, 
 
 The greedy selfishness that eats and drinks 
 
 While brother men in wolfish famine cry. 
 
 His words of faith still ring with steadfast note 
 
 To lead the way to perfect victory. 
 
 His vision high of earth redeemed to God, 
 
 Still shines before our eyes with holy cheer. 
 
 We, too, in our highest moods catch gleams 
 
 Of one wide brotherhood from pole to pole. 
 
 Each man still mindful of his fellow's weal : 
 
 Of children unpolluted by foul sin 
 
 And growing in all beauteous grace and truth ; 
 
 Of laws the reflex of the mind of God. 
 
 Not needed to restrain, but set to draw 
 
 All hearts in one vast harmony of truth. 
 
 Not of a distant heaven Jesus dreamed. 
 
 But of this beauteous earth on which we dwell. 
 
 Made doubly beauteous by sweet peace and love. 
 
 He prayed tha.t here God's kingdom blest should come 
 
 That heye His will be done as 'tis in heaven. 
 
 And in that word spake forth the thought divine 
 
 To which all saints and sages still aspire. 
 
 For this men toil, and hope, and daily pray. 
 
 And, toiling thus, they^yet but follow Him. 
 
 H. C. Hawkes. 
 
 If nothing but the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer 
 had come down to us of Christ's actual sayings, they 
 would constitute by themselves the most precious 
 inheritance of mankind. In its simplicity and com- 
 
 I
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 123 
 
 pleteness the latter, in particular is unapproachable. It 
 is for all time the model of prayer for all sorts and 
 conditions of men. And the context is hardly less 
 instructive. Christ clearly deprecated praying in 
 public : 
 
 And when thou prayest thou shall not be as the hypocrites are ; 
 for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and in the corners 
 of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto 
 you, They have their reward. 
 
 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when 
 thou hast shut the door, pray to thy Father who seeth in secret, and 
 thy Father who seeth in secret shall recompense thee. — Matt, vi., 
 5.6. 
 
 What a rebuke have we here to " the clergy of all 
 denominations," and to our street preachers ! The true 
 prayer must ever be secret to be effectual. Laborare est 
 ovave (to work is to pray). That is the form which 
 public prayer ought ever to assume if we would escape 
 the condemnation of the ** hypocrites." 
 
 And even in the performance of good works, alms- 
 giving for example, secrecy is expressly enjoined : — 
 
 But, when thou doest alms, let not thyjileft hand know what thy 
 right hand doeth. 
 
 That thine alms may be in secret ; and thy Father who seeth in 
 secret Himself shall reward thee openly. — Matt. vi. 3, 4. 
 
 Here again we have a distinct precept of the T^Taster 
 Bystematically violated by His pretended followers. 
 When we subscribe money for any charitable purpose 
 we must needs have our names paraded as munificent 
 donors, otherwise we incontinently button up our 
 pockets. Our charity subscription lists — what are 
 they but the analogues of the trumpets which the 
 "hypocrites" sounded before them in Hebrew street 
 and synagogue when they did their alms ? And verily 
 we, as they, receive our reward : — 
 
 And not merely was prayer to be secret, it was to be 
 to the last degree concise and comprehensive : — 
 
 And when ye pray use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do ; for 
 they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. 
 
 Be not ye, therefore, hke unto thani, for your Father knoweth 
 what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him. — Matt. vi. 7, 8. 
 
 And assuredly the form of prayer which Christ
 
 124 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR: 
 
 taught His disciples has a business-like directness— 
 curtness almost — about it (if I may use such language), 
 which is at first sight amazing. But a little reflection, 
 and all is plain. The Supreme Being whom Christ 
 revealed was no longer the awful, sternly righteous 
 "jealous " Jehovah of the Law and the Prophets, but a 
 loving Father ready to kill the fatted calf for the most 
 prodigal of His erring sons. All through His ministry 
 "Father" is the name the Messiah applies to God as 
 best expressing the true relations existing between the 
 human and the Divine — " My Father and your Father, 
 My God and your God." In prayer, therefore, there 
 was no need of many words : — 
 
 For every one that asketh receiveth ; and he that seeketh findeth ; 
 and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. 
 
 And of which of you that is a father shall his son ask a loaf, and 
 he give him a stone ; or a fish, and he for a fish give him a serpent ? 
 
 Or if he ask an egg, will he give him a scorpion ? 
 
 If ye then being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, 
 how much more shall your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit 
 [spiritual health] to them that ask Him ?— Luke xi. lo, ii, 12, 13. 
 
 We are now in a position to interpret the prayer 
 itself. To pray, is to commune with a gracious 
 Father. 
 
 Oi(r Father. ''Ouy Father," be it observed, not my 
 Father. Prayer though it be secret communion be- 
 tween the individual soul of man and God, is 5'et 
 a collective act, inasmuch as he who prays is pre- 
 cluded from asking for any "good gift" for himseli 
 which he does not equally ask for the entire brother- 
 hood of mankind. The common Father has no 
 favourites, and will assuredly turn a deaf ear to every 
 petition that is not universally applicable to all His 
 childrens' needs. Most prayers, it is to be feared, are 
 mere expressions of selfish desires that cannot, and do 
 not deserve, to be heard. If we do not first fully grasp 
 the Brotherhood of Man how are we to conceive 
 adequately of the Fatherhood of God ? If we love not 
 brother man, whom we have seen, how arc we to love 
 ^jid trust God, whom we have not seen ? 
 
 WhQ art in Heaven. Where is Heaven ? Somewhere
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 125 
 
 up in the sky is still the general impression. But 
 Heaven is where God is, whose '* Kingdom cometh not 
 by observation." ** Behold the Kingdom of Heaven is 
 within you." The heaven or hell within us is the true 
 heaven or hell for us, individually and collectively, and 
 we need inquire no further as to its location. 
 
 Hallowed be Thy Name. What does this mean? It 
 means that we are not to attribute to God character- 
 istics foreign to His Divine Fatherhood. " God is 
 love" and "perfect love casteth out fear." This is 
 what nearly all the Churches forget to inculcate. They 
 often drive the very best men and women into in- 
 difference or positive irreligion by false representations 
 of the Father's character. Instead of setting forth His 
 perfect holiness they make him worse than the worst of 
 His earthly children. 
 
 Thy Kingdom come. That is to say, Abolish O just 
 God, the cruel social inequality by which for long ages 
 Thy children have been aflhcted. Cast down Mammon 
 in all his polluted sanctuaries of monarchy, hierarchy, 
 aristocracy, and plutocracy, and banish the monster for 
 evermore from the face of Thy fair earth. Exorcise 
 the foul fiend of Competition and replace him by Divine 
 Co-operation, communal and inter-communal, national 
 and inter-national. Erect on the firm foundations 
 of absolute social and economic equality a lasting 
 Temple of Humanity in which till the end of time the 
 sublime song of triumph shall ascend, '* Glory to God 
 in the highest, on the earth peace and goodwill to 
 men.' " 
 
 Thy will he done on earth as it is in Heaven. That is, 
 inspire all men to do Thy will, and thereby enable 
 them to convert this thorny world into an earthly 
 Paradise, the vestibule of that other which lies beyond 
 where •' God shall be All in All." 
 
 Give us day by day our daily bread. The Rev. Stewart 
 Headlam in his " Laws of Eternal Life " — a most 
 suggestive little volume — thus faithfully explains this 
 petition : — " Us, not me. If I am getting my daily bread 
 at the cost or at the risk of depriving others of theirs,
 
 m6 the gospel of the poor. 
 
 I pray Thee, Oh! Father, take it from me. If I have 
 bread enough for many days, and others have not 
 bread enough for to-day, I pray Thee to take it trom 
 me and give it to them. I pray for a distribution of 
 wealth according to Thy just and Fatherly laws." 
 
 In the light of this, the true significance of the petition, 
 how is it to be regarded, say, in the mouths of the 
 " Successors of the Apostles " ? One would think for 
 example, that the Archbishop of Canterbury, with his 
 two palaces and his ^15,000 a year would fairly choke 
 on the words, Carlyle spoke of the Anglican Establish- 
 ment as " that great lying Church," and could there be 
 any better proof of its unblushing mendacity than that 
 its hierarcy should dare to repeat, " Give us this day our 
 daily bread." I am not surprised to know that a 
 Minister of Christ so thoroughly faithful to His Master 
 as Mr. Stewart Headlam has had difficulties with such 
 ♦' successors of the Apostles." 
 
 And forgive us otiv debts as wt also have forgiven our debtors. 
 The debts here spoken of are called " sins " by St. 
 Luke, and in the shorter Catechism of the Westminster 
 divines, if I recollect aright, "sin" is defined as " any 
 want of conformity to, or transgression of, the will of 
 God." Any way, the definition is a good one. " Be 
 ye perfect," said Christ, " even as your Father in 
 Heaven is perfect." " God is love," and all his sons 
 owe Him an immense debt of filial love, which can only 
 be discharged by strict conformity to His will as revealed 
 by Christ. 
 
 And Christ left us iu "no doubt as to what that will 
 was. It was not sayers, but doers of the " Word " 
 who were to be justified. " Verily I say unto you, inas- 
 iiuich as ye have done it [fed the hungry, clothed the 
 naked, visited the prisoners, etc.] ye have done it unto 
 Me." Christ, " the Word made fiesh," identified Him- 
 self with all humanity — especially suffering humanity — 
 and declared that a cup of cold water given to one such 
 was given to Himself. Truly, then, have we all 
 tremendous debts to be forgiven us for neglected oppor- 
 tunities of rendering service to our fellow-men. But,
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. I27 
 
 just as it is our dut}' to forgive those that trespass 
 against us " until seventy times seven," so is it in an in- 
 finitely greater measure with Divine mercy and forgive*- 
 ness. " Seek and ye shall find." 
 
 And bring us not into temptation Strong are heredity 
 and environment, and no man can hope to escape their 
 influence ! Mammon, the God of this world, has his 
 emissaries everywhere to entrap the unwary and make 
 them fall down and v/orship him. •* Ye cannot serve 
 God and Mammon." But God is stronger than 
 Mammon, and can and will 
 
 Deliver us from evil. And Christ Himself was, and is 
 that Deliverance, the Grand Emancipator, the Way, the 
 Truth, and the Life, who, being lifted up, will eventually 
 draw all men unto Him
 
 128 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 No. XXIV. 
 
 CHRIST AND WOMAN. 
 
 O woman, in our hours of ease, 
 Uncertain, coy, and hard to please 
 And variable as the shade 
 By the light, quivering aspen made. 
 When care and anguish wring the brow, 
 A ministering angel thou ! 
 
 Sir Walter Scott. 
 
 The morality of antiquity could not rise to the redemption of 
 woman —Schmidt. 
 
 The female sex, in which antiquity saw nothing but inferiority, 
 which Plato considered intended to do the same things as the male, 
 only not so well, was understood for the first time by Christ. — EcCE 
 Homo. 
 
 The courtesan was the only free woman in Athens. — Lecky. 
 
 It is noteworthy that there is no record of any insult 
 offered by any v/oman to the Son of Man. On the con- 
 trary, from Pilate's wife to Mary of Magdala, woman- 
 kind loved and befriended Him with a constancy and 
 fearlessness that may well make the " lord of creation" 
 blush for shame. All His relations with women were 
 exquisitely beautiful. 
 
 He was known to His contemporaries as " the Son 
 of Mary," not as the " Son of Joseph." To the loving 
 and loved Magdalen He made His first appearance 
 after His resurrection, and to the much-married (and 
 unmarried) Samaritan woman at Jacob's well at the 
 foot of Mount Gerizim, He delivered the greatest oracle
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. I29 
 
 ever uttered in this world — an oracle not even yet 
 *• understanded " of the Churches : — 
 
 The woman saith unto Him .... 
 
 " Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, and ye say that in 
 Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship." 
 
 Jesus saith unto her, " Woman believe me the hour cometh when 
 ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the 
 Father." 
 
 " But the hour cometh and now is when the true worshippers 
 shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeketh 
 such to worship Him." 
 
 " God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him 
 in spirit and in truth." — St. John iv., 19, 20, 21, 23, 24. 
 
 The " Disciples," we learn, " marvelled that He 
 talked with the woman." (Ibid v. 27.) They might 
 have marvelled still more at the talkf for it embodied 
 for evermore the very essence of all true religion. The 
 absolute, indestructible religion that requires neither 
 temple, priest, nor parson, was for the first time revealed 
 by Christ, not to His Disciples, but to a frail Samaritan 
 woman! Moreover, as we know, "the Jews had no 
 dealings with the Samaritans." It was pollution to eat 
 or drink with them and, even if the woman had been 
 a correct and orthodox Jewess, to accost her publicly 
 was a most reprehensible breach of decorum on the 
 Messiah's part. The Pharisees held it heinous for a 
 man to salute a woman in a public place, even if she 
 were his wife. Well might the woman declare, " Sir, 
 I perceive that thou art a prophet." — v. ig 
 
 Among the Jews the position of woman was un- 
 doubtedly better than anything the Pagan world could 
 show. But in the devotions of the synagogue there is a 
 thanksgiving that speaks volumes : " Blessed art Thou, 
 O Lord our God, King of the Universe ! Who hast not 
 made me a woman." Concubinage was a recognised 
 institution. Polygamy was not forbidden, and divorce 
 by reason of the hardness of the male heart was easy. 
 In a word, there was then, as now, great inequality — 
 social and political — between the sexes ; but in excep- 
 tional circumstances the "capable woman" of the 
 Book of Proverbs was neither unknown nor unhonoured
 
 130 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 The " mother in Israel," the Sarah, the Miriam, the 
 Deborah, was a very different person from the Greek or 
 Roman matron. 
 
 In early Greece and Rome the status of the wife was 
 hardly distinguishable from that of a slave. She was 
 held in perpetual tutelage by her husband, or in the 
 event of his death, by her sons with whom she could 
 not so much as sit down at table. Women of the type 
 of Cornelia, the Mother of the Gracchi, were regarded 
 as portents, and little wonder. Philosophy encouraged 
 rather than discouraged, the grossest forms of sensuality. 
 Even Socrates, the purest and wisest of the Greeks, 
 seems to have seen nothing very reprehensible in the 
 occupation of the beautiful courtesan Theodota. Nay, 
 the sage is said to have given her some good advice re- 
 ing her relations with her lovers. As for Plato, he 
 sought to abolish marriage altogether and to reduce 
 woman to a mere matrix from which the children of the 
 State were periodically to issue, according to the ex- 
 igencies of the Commonwealth. 
 
 Such were ancient philosophy and morality with 
 respect to maternity. What wonder then that the 
 most frightful excesses everywhere prevailed. Female 
 virtue came to be regarded with contempt. Men did 
 not desire it, and women made no pretence of practis- 
 ing it. From all parts of the East the most winsome 
 girls were sought out and consigned to Rome in vast 
 numbers to minister to the brutal passions of the de- 
 graded nobles. They received a special training in 
 sensuality, and at banquets they were expected to 
 gratify their masters by the most shameful exhibitions. 
 
 Moralists like Cicero and Seneca regarded almost the 
 whole womanhood of their day as hopelessly depraved 
 and abandoned. Abortion and infanticide were so 
 common that hardly anybody thought it worth while 
 to censure them. In Imperial Rome the infidelity of 
 wives was taken for granted. *» Women reckoned 
 their age not by the number of consulates, but by the 
 number of husbands they had divorced." They emulated 
 the professional Hetatrai or " companions ' to the best of
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. I3I 
 
 their ability. In a word, the Grseco-Roman world of 
 Christ's day had sunk so low in every form of sensu- 
 ality and bestiality, that if Christ had not, by precept 
 and example, restored woman to her true place in 
 society as mother and helpmate of man, utter perdition 
 must have overtaken it. 
 
 In order to judge of the degree of civilization attained 
 at any time by a given State, it is only necessary to 
 ascertain the position assigned to woman by it. Until 
 women are placed, in all economic and political circum- 
 stances, on a perfect footing of equality with men, 
 society remains Pagan rather than Christian. To en- 
 franchise women would be to abolish war with all its 
 burdens and barbarities, with many another hoary 
 iniquity. 
 
 To erring, but penitent woman, Jesus was peculiarly 
 gracious. Indeed, though enjoining a much stricter 
 marriage law in the interest of wotnan than that of 
 Moses, He dealt so leniently with sins of the flesh that 
 He was stigmatized by the " unco' guid " of his day as 
 a friend of harlots. But He explained this friendship 
 in a way that confounded the Pharisee, who " spake 
 within himself, saying, This man, if he were a prophet 
 would have known who and what manner of woman 
 this is that toucheth Him ; for she is a sinner." Christ 
 freely admitted that her sins were "many " — 
 
 And Jesus answering said unto him, " Simon, I have somewhat to 
 Bay unto thee." And he saith, " Master say on." 
 
 " There was a certain creditor who had two debtors : the one 
 owed five hundred pence, and the other fifty. 
 
 " And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both. 
 " Tell me, therefore, which of them will love him most ?" 
 
 Simon answeral and said, " I suppose that he to whom he forgave 
 most." 
 
 And He said unto him, " Thou hast rightly judged." 
 
 And He turned to the woman, and said unto Simon, " Seest thou 
 this woman ? I entered into thine house, thou gavest Me no water 
 for My feet ; but she hath washed My feet with tears, and wiped 
 them with the hairs of her head. 
 
 Thou gavest me no kiss ; but this woman since the time I came 
 in hath not ceased to kiss My feet. 
 
 " My head with oil thou didst not anoint ; but this woman bath 
 anointed My feet with ointment.
 
 132 THE GOSPEL OP THE POOR. 
 
 "Wherefore I say unto thee, her sins which are many, are forgiven 
 for she loved mucn. But to whom little is forgiven the same loveth 
 little." — Luke vii., 40 to 47. 
 
 Peccata nmiitunhir quia multitm amavit ! Her sins are 
 forgiven because she loved much. That is to say, she 
 recognised in Christ the beauty of perfect hoHness, and 
 was drawn towards it as if by a magnet. The Pharisee 
 was whole and needed no physician, but the woman was 
 sick and did. The Physician of Souls had come, and 
 for her love's sake He cured her on the spot. Is not 
 God Himself love, and was the " sinner" not to have 
 her great love reciprocated ? 
 
 I waive the quantum of the sin, 
 
 The hazard o' concealin", 
 Bat oh ! it hardens a' within', 
 
 And petrifies the feelin'. 
 
 So, sorrowfully sang Burns, but his heart, like the 
 erring woman's of the gospel, never underwent com- 
 plete petrification, and to him, as to her, Christ's mercy 
 has doubtless been bountifully extended. 
 
 The story of the woman taken flagrante delicto is yet 
 more striking. On that occasion, as has been beauti- 
 fully said, " He wrote but once, and then on sand." 
 Who shall point the moral or adorn the tale of that 
 opisode? 
 
 And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto Him a woman taken 
 in adultery ; and when they had set her in the midst. 
 
 They say unto Him, " Master, this woman was taken in adultery, 
 in the very act. 
 
 Now, Moses in the Law commanded us that such should be stoned, 
 bnt what sayest Thou ? " 
 
 This they said tempting Him, that they might have to accuse Him. 
 But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground, as 
 though He heard them not. 
 
 So when they continued asking Him, He lifted up Himself, and 
 said unto them, " He that is without sin among you, let him first 
 cast a stone at her." 
 
 And again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. 
 
 And they who heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, 
 went oilt one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last ; 
 and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. 
 
 When Jesus had lifted Himself, and saw none but the woman, He 
 said unto her. " Woman, where axe those thine accusers ? Hath 
 ao man condemned thee ? "
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 133 
 
 She said, " No man, Lord." And Jesus said unto her •• Neither 
 do I condemn thee. Go, and sin no more." — St. John, viii., 
 3— II. 
 
 Hath no man condemned thee ? No man, Lord ? 
 Then neither do /, the Son of Man, condemn thee. 
 Did He lay emphasis on the " I " ?
 
 134 The gospel of the poor. 
 
 No. XXV. 
 
 CHRIST AND LABOUR. 
 
 It is right tliat Greeks should rule over barbarians but not bar- 
 barians over Greeks; for those are slaves, but these are freemen. — 
 Eoripides. 
 
 Nature endeavours to make the bodies of freemen and slaves 
 dififerent ; the latter strong for necessary use, the former erect and 
 useless for such operations, but useful for political life. ... It is 
 evident, then, that by nature some men are free, others slaves, and 
 that, in the case of the latter, slavery is both beneficial and just. 
 — Aristotle. 
 
 Is not this the carpenter, the Son of Mary ?— St Mark. 
 
 Let him that stole steal no more; but rather let him labour, 
 working with his hands. . . . These hands ministered to my neces- 
 sities, and to them that were with me.— St. Pa0l. 
 
 My Father worketh hitherto and I work.— Jesus Christ. 
 
 Then gird thy loins to manly toil, | j 
 
 And in that toil have joy ; 
 Greet hardship with a forward smile, 
 
 And love the stern employ. 
 Thy glory this — the harsh to tame, 
 
 And by wise stroke, and technic flame, 
 In Godlike labour's fruitful name 
 
 Old chaos to destroy. 
 
 Of all Greece's great poets, Euripides was the most 
 tender-hearted ; of all her boasted philosophers Aristotle 
 was the most profound; yet neither had the faintest 
 conception of what we moderns understand by the 
 Rights of Labour. Their world was a world of bullies
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. I35 
 
 and slaves, where the slaves had no rights whatever. 
 Slave and worker were practically synonymous, and 
 even to speak to a slave was a dishonour. Cato, most 
 unbending of Roman moralists, would turn out his most 
 aged and infirm slaves to perish by the riverside of 
 cold and hunger without the slightest compunction. 
 The polished Pollio, the founder of the first public 
 library at Rome, would feed the lampreys in his fish- 
 ponds with such slaves as gave him offence. When a 
 great man died his obsequies could not well be celebrated 
 without a gladiatorial exhibition, in which two or three 
 score workers were made to murder each other. On 
 one occasion the great Imperial administrator Trajan 
 celebrated public " games," which lasted for four months. 
 In that time the blood of ten thousand workers soaked 
 the sands of the arena. Even women and children 
 were made to gash each other with knives " to make a 
 Roman holiday." Lions, wolves, panthers, bears, and 
 snakes were frequently among the combatants. It was 
 a horrible world, and if the Son of Man had not appeared 
 when He did to proclaim the glad tidings of Universal 
 Human Brotherhood, the Empire of the Caesars, its 
 letters, science, and art must have gone to utter wreck 
 and ruin. The Messiah's mission was to make the first 
 last and the last first; to cast down the "Classes" 
 and exalt the " Masses." 
 
 Has He succeeded ? Has His Kingdom come ? Is 
 it coming ? That is the problem which perplexes all 
 earnest thinkers at this moment ; for it is clear, at least 
 to my mind, that *• without Me ye can do nothing." 
 Roswell D. Hitchcock (U.S.A.), quoted by Dr. Clifford 
 in his admirable pamphlet. The New City of God states 
 the grand problem thus : — 
 
 ** Christianity triumphed over the Graeco-Roman 
 civilization ; has triumphed in mediaeval and modern 
 Europe ; has, in short, conquered all the best races in 
 history thus far. Now, can it conquer to the bottom, 
 as it has always conquered to the top ? Can it evangelise 
 its own cities, going down into the cellars, up into the 
 garrets of its own heathen at home ? Hard as the task
 
 136 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 pay be, Christianity stands squarely committed to it. 
 If Christianity fails in this— its supreme endeavour, — 
 it is not of God. But it will not fail." 
 
 I have taken the liberty of italicising the last sentence ; 
 for, if I could not endorse the prediction, then to me as 
 to so many other footsore travellers in the arid desert 
 of the present, life would indeed seem to be no longer 
 worth living. The decisive battle of the religion ol 
 Christ is at hand, and on the field of Labour it must 
 be fought and won : — 
 
 And before Him shall be gathered all nations ; and He shall 
 separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep 
 from his goats. 
 
 And He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on 
 His left. 
 
 Then shall the King say unto them on His right hand : Come, ye 
 blessed of my Father inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from 
 the foundation of the world : 
 
 For I was an hungered, and ye gave Me meat : I was thirsty, and 
 ye gave Me drink ; I was a stranger, and ye took Me in : 
 
 Naked, and ye clothed Me : I was sick, and ye visited Me : I 
 was in prison, and ye came unto Me : 
 
 Then shall the righteous answer Him, saying: Lord, when saw we 
 Thee an hungered, and fed Thee ? or thirsty and we gave Thee 
 drink ? 
 
 When saw we Thee a stranger and took Thee in ? or naked and 
 clothed Thee ? 
 
 Or when saw we Thee sick, or in prison and came unto Thee ? 
 
 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto 
 you inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My 
 brethren, ye have done it unto Me. — Matt, xxv., 32-40. 
 
 In hoc signo vinces. *' Inasmuch as ye have done it 
 unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done 
 it unto Me." Here we have the talisman that repels 
 every doubt as to the supreme worth of every human 
 life ; for who would not live to enjoy the privilege of 
 ministering to the physical needs of the Blessed 
 Nazarene ? Charles Lamb, I think it was, that once 
 said to some literary friends in the course of a discus- 
 sion : " If Shakespeare were now to enter this room we 
 should all stand up to do him honour ; but if Jesus of 
 Nazareth were to come in, we should all fall down and 
 kiss the hem of His garment." 
 
 " I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me."
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. I37 
 
 Slow indeed has been the process by which men have 
 been drawn to Christ, but when the Labour Problem 
 is solved, banishing hunger, nakedness, homelessness, 
 and premature death from this beautiful earth, then will 
 His Kingdom {regnum, rule) have come, not " with ob- 
 servation," but '• with power." Then will the Brother- 
 hood of Man cease to be a phrase and become a reality. 
 Then shall the Son of Man reign in the hearts of all His 
 •• brethren." 
 
 Abou Ben Adhem (May his tribe increase I) 
 
 Awoke, one night, from a deep dream of peace, 
 
 And saw, within the moonlight in his room, 
 
 Making it rich and like a lily in bloom, 
 
 An Angel writing in a Book of Gold. 
 
 Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold, 
 
 And to the presence in the room he said, 
 
 " What writest thou " ? The Angel raised his head, 
 
 And, in a voice made all of sweet accord. 
 
 Answered ! "The names of those that love the Lord. 
 
 " And is mine one ? " said Abou. " Nay, not so," 
 
 Replied the Angel. Abou spake more low. 
 
 But cheerily still and said ; " I pray thee then 
 
 Write me as one who loves his fellow-men." 
 
 The Angel wrote and vanished. 
 
 Next night he came again with a great awakening light 
 
 And shewed the names of those whom love of God had blest. 
 
 And lo 1 Ben Adhem's name led all the rest. 
 
 " From each according to his deeds, to each accord- 
 ing to his needs." Such is the formula of the most 
 advanced school of Continental Socialism. It is also 
 the principle regulating Labour in the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, not in nubibus, mind, but on this solid earth 
 — here and now. 
 
 For the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a man that is a house- 
 holder, who went out early in the morning to hire labourers into 
 his vineyard. 
 
 And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, 
 he sent them into his vineyard. 
 
 And he went out about the third hour and saw others standing 
 idle in the market place. 
 
 And said unto them : Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatso- 
 ever is right I will give you. And they went their way. 
 
 Again he went out about the sixth and ninth hour, and did likewise. 
 
 And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others 
 standing idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye all the day idle ?
 
 138 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith 
 unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard ; and whatsoever is riefht 
 that shall ye receive. 
 
 So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his 
 steward, Call the labourers and give them their hire, beginning from 
 the last unto the first 
 
 And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, 
 they received every man a penny. 
 
 But when the first came they supposed that they should have 
 received more, and they likewise received every man a penny. 
 
 And when they had received it they murmured against the good 
 man of the house. 
 
 Saying, These last have worked but one hour, and thou hast 
 made them equal to us who have borne the burden and heat of the 
 day. 
 
 But he answered one of them, and said, Friend, I do thee no 
 wrong ; didst thou not agree with me for a penny ? 
 
 Take that thine is and go thy way ; I will give unto this last even 
 as unto thee. — Matt. xv. i, 14. 
 
 In the first place, be it noted that the labour here 
 spoken of, vineyard labour, is of a light and agreeable 
 character, a type of what, under the Coming Co- 
 operative Commonwealth, all labour, as far as possible, 
 will be rendered. 
 
 Secondly, the "penny" of the parable was there 
 and then good wages, enabling the recipient to live in 
 comfort. 
 
 Thirdly, the morning man, the ninth hour man, and 
 even the eleventh hour man each received the same 
 recompense, because the upright " householder" knew 
 that if their deeds were not equal their needs were. 
 That is to say in the Kingdom of Heaven, i.e., the 
 Communistic Commonwealth, no man shall suffer for 
 lack of opportunity, intelligence, or physical strength. 
 It will not merely be the duty but the pride and plea- 
 sure of the strong to support the weak, doing twice or 
 thrice their own share of the common toil, in order that 
 the least of Christ s brethren may be relieved from 
 burdens to which tticy are unequal. 
 
 Murmurers at social equality do not relish the 
 doctrine of the universal " penny." The usurer talks 
 of " the reward of abstinence," the clever man of the 
 " rent of ability ; " but the " householder " keeps each
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. I39 
 
 stiffly to his contract. " Didst not thou agree with me 
 for a penny? Is thine eye evil, because I am good? 
 The first shall be last, and the last first." 
 
 For why ? Did not the Great Lord of the Vineyard 
 Himself come "not to be ministered unto, but to minister, 
 and to give His life a ransom for many ?" Went He 
 not about doing good, and healing all that were 
 " oppressed of the devil " ? — the devil of " covetousness " 
 or competition. 
 
 Ah, well does Dr. CHfford say in the pamphlet to which 
 I have alluded ; — 
 
 «' Misery gravitates to Him as flowers to the sun. 
 The Pariahs of Society, the ♦ Roughs ' and ' Fallen 
 Women ' come out of their hiding places whenever 
 He draws near. Himself despised and rejected of 
 men, cast out by the leaders of ' Society,' ♦ Theology,' 
 • Ritual,' and * State,' He is the natural friend of social 
 outcasts, the poor, maimed, halt and bUnd. They 
 gather about him as men numb with cold about a 
 glowing fire. He is Himself the good Samaritan. He 
 paints and takes the colours in His picture from His own 
 Soul. He is the 'layman,' with the big heart, who 
 pours ' oil and wine ' into the gaping wounds of the 
 victims oi tyrannical strength, whilst the man « in 
 orders,' the cultured ecclesiastic of the metropolis, 
 gathers up his robes, grips his prayer-book, and hurries 
 breathless to his ritual, his pigmy soul all unstirred by 
 the miseries and woes of the squalid and vulgar traveller, 
 prostrate and bleeding on the road."
 
 140 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 No. XXVI. 
 
 CHRIST AND THE STATE 
 
 No citizen has a right to consider himself as belonging to himself 
 but all ought to regard themselves as belonging to the State, inas- 
 much as each is a part of the State ; and care for the part naturally 
 looks to care for the whole. — Aristotle. 
 
 There was a law that the cadets (at Sparta) should present them- 
 selves naked in public before the Ephors every ten days, and if they 
 were well knit and strong, and looked as if they had been carved and 
 hammered into shape by gymnastics, they were praised ; but if their 
 limbs showed any flabbiness or softness, any swelling or suspicion 
 of adipose matter due to laziness, they were flogged and justiced 
 there and then. — ^Elian. 
 
 Go, tell at Sparta, thou that passeth by, 
 
 That here, obedient to her laws, we lie. — SiMONIDES 
 
 In place of teaching better laws for the government of men by 
 other men as erring, sinful, and selfish as themselves, Christ taught 
 that all "juch laws and government are unnecessary to any people 
 who believe that there is something more sacred, higher, and holier 
 than private rights, and are willing by faith to renounce all human 
 statutory advantages in order to acquire divine truth. — Arics, the 
 Libyan. 
 
 Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion ; shout, O daughter of 
 Jerusalem; behold, thy King comcth unto thee: He is just, and 
 having salvation ; lowly and riding upon an ass, even upon a colt 
 the foal of an ass. — Zechariah, ix., 9. 
 
 What was Christ's attitude towards the State ? Had 
 He any sense of patriotism ? Thinkers, and able thinkers 
 too, like Lecky and Mill, while readily conceding the 
 incalculable beneficence of His Word in the domain 
 of morals and (by implication) economics, complain
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. X4X 
 
 that He ignores the " civic virtues." " It is in the 
 Koran a:id not in the New Testament," says Mill, " that 
 we read the maxim, * A ruler who appoints any man to 
 an office when there is in his dominions another man 
 better qualified for it, sins against God and against the 
 State."' 
 
 True, but Christ did not so much as recognise any 
 necessity for the existence of the State. To Him the 
 State was in its very essence evil — an institution in all 
 its aims in necessary antagonism to the Kingdom of 
 God, which He came to proclaim. For what was, 
 what practically is the State ? Organised Mammon- 
 worship, and nothing else. Its one precept is — TJiou 
 shalt steal ; whereas, that of the Kingdom is — Tliou shalt 
 not be stolen from. Personal ambition, warlike enterprise, 
 and commercial competition are the "civic virtues" 
 which the State applauds and rewards, and the religion 
 of Christ condemns and prohibits in toto. 
 
 Church and State knew well enough what they were 
 about when, in the " place of a skull," they nailed the 
 sublime Communist- Anarchist of Galilee, the World- 
 Revolutionist, to a Government cross with a Govern- 
 ment spear in His side. They had the impious 
 *' agitator " promptly " removed " by putting in motion 
 the State machinery of " law and order." A perfectly 
 correct instinct told them that the gentle Nazarene 
 was an infinitely greater menace to their " rights of 
 property " than a thousand " robbers " of the type of 
 Barabbas. 
 
 Barabbas, in his own way, was doubtless a redresser 
 of social inequalities and wrongs, and in a measure to 
 be commended ; but he was a clumsy operator who 
 could be dealt with at any^time. But with ♦' the King 
 that came " : He that was "just and having salvation ; 
 lowly and riding upon an ass, even upon a colt, the 
 foal of an ass," it was a very different matter. He was 
 truly a danger to "Society," for who ever heard of a 
 Kiug coming in such a guise ? Had He come along the 
 streets of Jerusalem in a magnificent State carriage, 
 with a superbly-mounted cavalcade of household troops,
 
 142 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 showering honours and offices on the " Classes," and 
 teaching the "Masses" to keep their distance from 
 his august person, what plaudits would have burst from 
 the throats of landlord, capitalist, and ecclesiastic ! 
 
 But SLJust and lowly King, bringing salvation to the 
 care-worn " Masses," nay Himself one of the " rabble," 
 was there ever anything known so outrageous ? Away 
 with him ! Away with him ! or he will " take away our 
 place and nation," we, the " Classes," being the nation, 
 to be sure ! 
 
 Not merely was Christ a lowly King. Being also^W, 
 He was a levelling King, who dissolved the entire 
 " machine " of State Government — princes, nobles, 
 judges, scribes, and all. " The princes of the Gentiles 
 bear dominion over them, and their great ones exercise 
 authority tipon them, hit among you it shall not be so ; he that 
 would be greatest among you let hint be the least, let him be the 
 servant of all." 
 
 Not birth, not wealth, not even intellect, but self- 
 sacrificing service was to bear rule in the Kingdom — the 
 first last and the last first. And be it noted : My service 
 is perfect freedom. Politics imply compulsion — policemen, 
 soldiers, magistrates, and jailers — but for three hundred 
 years after the Crucifixion Christians lived in the Empire 
 of the Caesars without being of it. Their organiza- 
 tion was purely voluntary — " free " — but so strong 
 that ten State persecutions of unparalleled atrocity but 
 added to its invincibihty. Would that it had but main- 
 tained that attitude and kept rigidly outside all political 
 influences 1 A few more persecutions and the State 
 must have succumbed to the Kingdom of God and 
 disappeared altogether, or have been transformed into 
 something utterly different from aught we know or have 
 ever read of Statecraft. 
 
 I am not always able to agree with the late Ernest 
 Renan in his view of Christ's teachings, but it seems to 
 me the following is highly suggestive, to say the 
 least : — 
 
 " Even in our days, troubled days, in which Jesus has 
 no more authentic followers than those who seem to
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. I43 
 
 deny Him, the dreams of an ideal organisation of society, 
 which have so much analogy with the aspiration of the 
 primitive Christian sects, are only in one sense the 
 blossoming of the same idea, one of the branches of that 
 immense tree in which germinates all thought of a future, 
 and of which the ' Kingdom of God ' will be eternally 
 the root and stem. All the social revolutions of humanity 
 will be grafted on this phrase. But tainted by a coarse 
 materialism, and aspiring to the impossible, that is to 
 say, to found universal happiness upon political and 
 economical measures, the ' Socialist ' attempts of our 
 time will remain unfruitful, until they take as their rule 
 the true Spirit of Jesus ; I mean absolute idealism — the 
 principle that in order to possess the world we must 
 renounce it. 
 
 ** The phrase * Kingdom of God,' on the other hand, 
 expresses also very happily the want which the soul 
 experiences of a supplementary destiny, of a compensa- 
 tion for the present life. Those who do not accept the 
 definition of man as a compound of two substances, and 
 who regard the Deistical dogma of the immortality of 
 the soul as in contradiction with physiology, love to 
 fall back upon the hope of a final reparation, which 
 under an unknown form shall satisfy the wants of the 
 heart of man. 
 
 " Who knows if the highest term of progress, after 
 millions of ages, may not evoke the absolute conscience 
 of the universe, and in this conscience the awakening 
 of all that has lived ? A sleep of a million of years is 
 not longer than the sleep of an hour. St. Paul, on this 
 hypothesis, was right in saying in ictu oculi. It is 
 certain that moral and virtuous humianity will have its 
 reward ; that one day the ideas of the poor, but honest 
 man will judge the world, and that on that day the 
 ideal figure of Jesus will be the confusion of the frivolous 
 man who has not believed in virtue, and of the egotist 
 who has not been able to attain it. The favourite 
 phrase of Jesus continues, therefore, full of an eternal 
 beauty. A sort of grandiose divinity seems in this to 
 have guided the incomparable Master, and to have
 
 144 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 held Htm in a vague sublimity, embracing at the same 
 time various orders of truths." 
 
 The dead heresiarch is right. The Spirit of Jesus is 
 needed to put a soul into materialistic Socialism, without 
 which it can aspire to nothing more than human 
 beaverism. The children o( the Kingdom, as in Apostolic 
 days, must not merely have all things in common ; they 
 must also be of one heart and one soul ; so that not one 
 of them shall say that aught of the things he possesses 
 is his own. And when none shall lack aught, then 
 again will men take knowledge of them that they have 
 been with Jesus, and God will give them favour with 
 the people and multiply converts indefinitely. 
 
 The question remains — What attitude should the 
 Christian Socialists of to-day assume towards the 
 State ? Should they abstain or intervene in politics ? 
 Christ clearly regarded the governing class of His day 
 as utterly reprobate limbs of perdition. He called his 
 own Monarch, Herod, by the worst name in the Jewish 
 vocabulary — " that jackal." He paid the Imperial 
 Taxes under protest, and warned His disciples to look 
 for nothing but persecution at the hands of the rulers of 
 the earth. 
 
 But the position is somewhat different now. We 
 have at last, thanks to the slowly permeating Spirit of 
 Christ, got a potential, if not an actual, democracy to 
 which to appeal, and we know that the "common 
 people" ever "heard Him gladly." In these cir- 
 cumstances it seems to me a present duty to cast 
 down Mammon by capturing his citadel, Parliament, 
 as speedily as possible, and erecting on its ruins the 
 true City of God. Thy Kingdom Come !
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 145 
 
 No. XXVII. 
 
 SUMMATION. 
 
 I am the true vine, and My Father is the husbandman. 
 
 Every branch in Me that beareth not fruit He taketh away, and 
 every branch that beareth fruit He purgeth it, that it may bring 
 forth more fruit. 
 
 Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto 
 you. 
 
 Abide in Me, and I in you. 
 
 As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the 
 vine, no more can ye, except ye abide in Me. 
 
 I am the vine ; ye are the branches ; he that abideth in Me, and I 
 inhim, the same bringeth forth much fruit ; for without Me ye can 
 do nothing. 
 
 Henceforth I call you not servants ; for the servant knoweth not 
 what his lord doetli ; but I have called you friends ; for all things 
 that I have heard of My Father I have made known unto you. — St. 
 John, xv., i, 2, 3, 4, 5, 15 
 
 I would fain, O Divine Son of Mary, have said something great ol 
 Thee. — Justin Martyr. 
 
 Alas, how hard is it to say aught that is not utterly 
 unworthy of the Blessed Nazarene! In reading the 
 four canonical biographies of Him — Matthew, Mark, 
 Luke and John — that have come down to us, one feels, 
 notwithstanding the supreme beauty, simplicity, and 
 candour of the narrations, that the narrators had before 
 them a much greater task than they were competent 
 adequately to perform. Not one of the disciples whom 
 He instructed with such tender solicitude seems to 
 have had anything like a correct appreciation of His 
 aims until after His death and resurrection. 
 
 Then, indeed, the light dawned upon them and the
 
 146 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 eyes of their understandings were gradually opened. 
 But even then it was left to St. Paul, who had no 
 personal acquaintance with Jesus, to make Him known to 
 the world at large. Now St. Paul was a heroic, strenuous 
 soul of the highest order, to whose learning and devotion 
 to the Master, Christendom may almost be said to owe its 
 organized existence ; but it is almost impossible to read 
 his authentic letters and believe that even he at all 
 adequately comprehended the spirit and teaching of 
 Him who spoke the Sermon on the Mount. Indeed, 
 but for the discourses, or actual words of Christ 
 recorded in the four Gospels (which may very reason- 
 ably be supposed to have been taken down and 
 circulated in His lifetime), we should to-day have a 
 very poor conception indeed of what manner of man 
 the Messiah really was. 
 
 But these discourses are so wonderful as to constitute 
 a greater marvel in the domain of ethics than do the 
 "signs" or "miracles" in that of physics. And both 
 fit into each other so completely that every attempt to 
 accept the one and explain away the other must ever 
 be a failure. They stand or fall together. Christ 
 recognised the duality of man's nature, and ministered 
 to his sick body as well as to his sick soul. 
 
 Yet was, and is, this Sublime Beneficence who "went 
 about doing good " and nothing but good, opening the 
 eyes of the physically and mentally blind, " despised 
 and rejected of men." " He came unto His own and 
 His own received Him not. But to as many as re- 
 ceived Him, to them gave He power to become the 
 Sons of God, even to them that believe on His name, 
 who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, 
 nor of the will of man, but of God." 
 
 Whence this most extraordinary of human paradoxes? 
 How came it to pass that the rulers of the earth had 
 nothing better than a cross whereon to die to offer to 
 Him who said, " Come unto me all ye that labour and 
 are heavy laden, and I will give you rest ; for I am 
 meek and lowly of heart. Blessed are they who do 
 hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shaU
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. I47 
 
 be filled. I am the bread of life : he that cometh to 
 Me shall never hunger, and he that believeth in Me 
 shall never thirst. I am the resurrection and the life ? " 
 
 The Church condemned the Christ for blasphemy ; 
 the State for sedition. Of the two powers, the 
 Church, as usual, was the more flagitious ; for it is 
 certain the pagan Pontius Pilatus strove hard to set 
 Jesus free, and would probably have done so in the 
 teeth of the priests, but for the fact that he had not at 
 the time sufficient troops in Jerusalem to enable him 
 to quell the serious riot with which he was threatened 
 by the turbulent Jews. 
 
 Pilate "could hnd no fault in Him," and what is not 
 a little singular is the fact that the Emperor Domitian, 
 some sixty years later, arrived, by implication, at the 
 same conclusion. Domitian was the brother of that 
 Titus, who A.D. 70, razed Jerusalem to the ground, and 
 assuredly no more suspicious and bloody-minded tyrant 
 ever sat on the throne of the Caesars. 
 
 He had heard that there were certain descendants 
 of King David still in existence, and among them two 
 grand-nephews of Jesus, grandsons of His brother 
 (or half-brother) Jude, living in Syria. The tyrant 
 had ordered that they should all be put to death ; 
 but mere curiosity or some other instinct induced him 
 to send an evocatm to bring the relatives of the Nazarene 
 before him. 
 
 Domitian first asked them if they were of the Davidic 
 stock. They said they were. He then enquired as to 
 their means of livelihood. " Between us," said they, 
 •* we possess only 9,000 denarii, of which each of us 
 takes half. And that property we possess not in money 
 but in the form of a piece of land of some thirty acres 
 upon which we pay the taxes, and we live by the labour 
 of our hands." 
 
 They then showed their hard toil-worn hands to the 
 tyrant, who next asked them about Christ's Kingdom 
 and the time and place of His Second Coming. They 
 replied that His Kingdom was a Celestial Kingdom, 
 " not of this world," and that at the end of time He 
 
 I
 
 148 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 would re-appear to judge the quick and the dead, accord- 
 ing to their works. 
 
 Regarding them probably'as harmless dreamers, the 
 Emperor dismissed them scatheless. 
 
 But though neither Pilate nor Domitian could dis- 
 cern any danger to Caesarism in the doctrines of the 
 Messiah, their view was superficial in the extreme. 
 '* Pilate therefore said unto Him, Art thou then a King ? 
 Jesus answered, Thou sayest it. To this end have I 
 been born, and to this end am I come into the world 
 that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one 
 that is of the truth heareth My voice. Pilate saith unto 
 him, What is truth ? " 
 
 He had no conception of a King of Truth, or of a 
 Kingdom of God, and little is he to be blamed when, 
 after nearly two thousand years' proclamation of the 
 imperishable verities of the Christian Faith, we find 
 the rulers of the earth almost as oblivious regarding 
 them as he was incredulous. 
 
 I have always had a certain latent sympathy for the 
 reprobated Roman who grimly wrote on the Cross of 
 Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews, 
 and who, when their chief priests expostulated with 
 him, curtly replied, Qiwd scripsi, scripsi. 
 
 At no time in the dreary blood-stained annals of man- 
 kind has God left Himself wholly without a witness, 
 but never has there been a witness like unto Him who 
 drank the cup of human sorrow to the very dregs on 
 Calvary. Moses and the Prophets had great work 
 appointed them to do amid surrounding darkness, and 
 they acquitted themselves like saints and heroes. Even 
 now, as has been seen, the Mosaic legislation on the 
 burning questions of land tenure, usury, poverty, etc., 
 would be a godsend to any so-called civilized State of 
 the modern world. That economic dispensation, it is 
 true, was fundamentally individualistic ; but it was 
 fenced about by so many anti-competitive safeguards 
 that its ideal, viz., that every man should sit under his 
 own vine and fig-tree with none to make him afraid, 
 was for centuries practically attained.
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. I49 
 
 But when Christ the All- Reformer, the Renovator 
 of the Human Conscience, appeared, " the weightier 
 matters of the Law " were all in abeyance. The 
 spirit had gone out of it. The "pastors and masters" 
 of the nation He found devouring widows' houses 
 and for a pretence making long prayers. He set 
 himself to fulfil the Law and the Prophets, and 
 by breathing on the dry bones He gave a new meaning 
 to the past and opened out vast vistas of hope for the 
 future of all mankind. 
 
 He abolished all private property, and with it the 
 State. He abolished all distinctions of race, rank, sex, 
 and intellect. He made the first last and the last first, 
 acknowledging only devoted service as true greatness ; 
 the only law, the Law of Love. 
 
 In His sweeping condemnation of egoism in every 
 form it seems dcJubtful if He did not even lay icono- 
 clastic hands on marriage and the family, as they existed 
 and exist. " In the resurrection they neither marry, 
 nor give in marriage, but are as the angels in heaven." 
 "Woman" (to His mother) "what have I to do with 
 thee? Whosoever shall do the will of My Father who 
 is in heaven the same is My brother and sister and 
 mother." 
 
 He may have foreseen that mere legal matrimony 
 and familism could not survive the communalisation 
 of property, and it may well be so. Marriage, as we 
 know it, is merely one of the many unwholesome fungi 
 that grow out of the reeking, rotting corpus of private 
 property, and it would not be difficult to conceive of 
 a sexual order infinitely more angelic. But until 
 woman is placed economically and politically on a 
 footing of perfect equality with man, it is worse than 
 useless, it is dangerous, to the best interests of mothers 
 and children, publicly to speculate on such a theme. 
 On this and many another difficult problem how sadly 
 do we require " more light, more light ! " 
 
 This "Gospel of the Poor" is now ended, but the 
 bubject is inexhaustible, and will only cease to interest 
 when the Kingdom of God itself shall have come with
 
 150 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 power on earth. But assuredly the Pale Galilean will 
 conquer in the end, and " make all things new." The 
 Spirit of Truth shall lead us unto all truth. Hath Ht 
 not said, " Lo, I am with you alway even unto thh 
 
 END OF THE WORLD 1 "
 
 APPENDIX I. 
 
 "IS CHRISTIANITY PLAYED OUT?" 
 
 THE EDITOR OF " THE DAILY CHRONICLE." 
 
 Sir, — I have not yet had the pleasure of reading Mr. Roben 
 Buchanan's " Wandering Jew," and must, therefore, meanwhile 
 content myself with his own statement of its import in Monday s 
 Daily Chronicle. 
 
 That statement is characterised by great vigour of expression 
 and a candour altogether admirable ; but though the figure of our 
 knight- errant poet, mounted on his prancing war-horse, and slashing 
 down with tiis good Andrea Ferrara foolhardy critics right and left, 
 is most impressive, it must yet, I tliink, be confessed that he is not 
 — well, to put it mildly — a conliniioiis reasoner, and that his meaning 
 in consequence is somewhat difhcult to grasp. Almost in the same 
 breath he " approbates and reprobates "—being a true Scot, he wil] 
 understand the phrase — in a most astonishing manner. 
 
 Christ, it seems, was morally perfect, or almost so, but intel- 
 lectually a most deplorable failure ; nay, " the very genius of 
 failure," 
 
 Wherein has this disastrous failure consisted ? In Christ s in- 
 ability " to realise the necessities, the conditions, and the laws of 
 average human nature." How came the Son of Man, Son of God, 
 the Divine Man, to err so egregiously ? Because " He judged men far 
 too gently, and He was far too sanguine about human perfectibility 
 — that is all! " And being thus unwarrantably sanguine about the 
 perfectibility of our frail human nature, what did the Wonderful, 
 the Counsellor do ? .Truly is it the une.xpected that happens. " He 
 affirmed that Heaven was here impossible because man was im-
 
 152 APPENDIX. 
 
 perfect " ! " He forgot that the Divine Kingdom, if it is to exist 
 
 at all, must begin where God first localised it — on this planet.' 
 " He recommends a policy of complete quiescence and stagna- 
 tion." " He turned from this world as from something in its very 
 nature base and detestable. ' 
 
 Nov/, if this be true — and it is the very kernel of Mr. Buchanan's 
 contention, so far as I can master it — Christianity is not merely 
 played out ; it was never, if I may so phrase it, played in. It has, 
 from first to last, in its veiy essence, and excluding Churchianiiy in 
 all its feculent forms, for all practical purposes been a delusion and 
 a snare to mankind. But before, under Mr. Buchanan's light and 
 leading, we adopt this momentous conclusion, it may be well to in- 
 quire what version of the New Testament he has been in the habit 
 of consulting. Certainly no one on which I have ever been able to 
 lay my hands. 
 
 earth as it is done in heaven. It was just ' on this planet," ) re and 
 now, that the kingdom was to "begin," and, so far was He fr(>. ^des- 
 pairing of human nature that He laid the injunction on His followers, 
 Be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect. Nay, to those 
 who were near Him shortly before His death He said : The works 
 that I do shall ye do also, and greater works than these shall ye do. Even 
 on the cross He found nothing that was irremediably depraved in 
 His very executioners — Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
 they do. 
 
 " He recommended a policy of complete quiescence and stagna- 
 tion " ! When ? Where ? Had this indictment been brought against 
 Buddhism, for example, it would have been intelligible. Buddhism 
 sacrifices so much to mere contemplation, that it may be justly 
 charged with much of the " stagnation " with which the East is un- 
 happily afflicted. But surely action is the very watchword of 
 genuine Christianity. My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. And 
 we know what was the quality of His works — works of tenderest 
 mercy and love which touch Mr. Buchanan as they have touched 
 the best hearts and the sanest intellects of all ages. Nay, he makes 
 a sort of enforced enigmatical admission, if not confession, of faith 
 which may be held to stultify nearly "all that he asserts regarding 
 '•the very genius of failure." Of course I don't seek to attach any 
 precise significance to his words, for as the Emperor was supra gram- 
 viaticain, so is our poet superior to logic ; but they are curious, all
 
 APPENDIX. 153 
 
 the same, and I therefore reproduce them : "Well, the dream of 
 Jesus was of God [a God of Love], and so is ours. That it will be 
 realised somehow and somewhere is my living faith. Nothing 
 beautiful or true can perish, and this world would be a charnel- 
 touse if eternal death were possible." 
 
 " Somehow and somewhere," then, the dream of Jesus Christ and 
 of Robert Buchanan is to be realised ; but Jesus, it seems, knew not 
 the modus operandi, at any rate " on this planet," and Robert's own 
 hints in the direction of realisation are, alas ! of the vaguest or even 
 non-existent order, affording no basis for profitable consideration. 
 
 Of far more consequence is it to be told why " Christ's message 
 to humanity has been spoken in vain." It was, we learn, " because 
 the nebulae of His love never cohered to an orb of rational polity." 
 In other words, Mr. Buchanan has either never heard of the Com- 
 munistic Commonwealth, the foundations of which Christ laid in 
 the very heart of the cruel, concupiscent empire of the Caesars, or 
 he disapproves of that polity. If he disapproves of Christian com- 
 munism (the polity in question), by all means let him say so. It 
 is nothing more than "Sovereigns and Statesmen," and the great 
 ones of the earth have at all times affirmed, at least in practice, 
 But there is, at all events, nothing in the slightest degree nebulous 
 about the communism which Christ and His followers preached and 
 practised. Karl Marx was an utter pagan, but there is not an 
 essential proposition in " Das Kapital " that Jesus of Nazareth 
 did not inculcate. 
 
 Is it a question of rent ? You are as much entitled to immunity 
 from it as the birds of the air or the grass of the fields. Is it a 
 question of usury or interest ? Lend hoping for nothing again. Is 
 it a question oi profit or inequitable exchange ? Do unto others as 
 ye would that they should do unto you. 
 
 And this very " rational," nay divine, " polity" was pursued by 
 the early Christians with such success that it brought down on 
 them ten Imperial persecutions of unparalled atrocity. Why ? 
 Because Christian communism — " the Communion of the Saints " — 
 threatened ''private property," the very foundation-stone of the 
 Roman State, the British State, and every other in the so-called 
 civilised world of to-day. 
 
 A late Right Rev. Father in God, it will be remembered was 
 severely taken to task for announcing that the principles of the 
 Sermon on the Mount were incompatible with the very existence 
 of the SUte ; but he was quite right. The State is organised for
 
 154 Appendix. 
 
 the express purpose of promoting and protecting private property, 
 whereas the Church (if we but had one) would recognise common 
 property alone. 
 
 The atheist Emperor Constantine, perhaps the champion criminal 
 of mankind, compared with whom Mr. Buchanan's " sullen " Im- 
 perial French "assassin" was a mere pigmy in wickedness, as 
 clearly apprehended the internecine character of the struggle as 
 the Anglican prelate. Th-^ " world" — his world — was threatened 
 with imminent ruin from the Christian imperium in imperio. Fire 
 and sword had done their worst, and signally failed. What to do ? 
 Turn Christian ! This the Imperial miscreant and his shameless 
 crew pretended to do, and from that day to this the " clergy of all 
 denominations" have served Mammon most faithfully and the 
 God ofeconomic freedom very fitfully, or not at all. 
 
 But all the same, I for one feel perfectly confident that genuine 
 Christianity is not only not played out, but that, appearances not- 
 withstanding, it is about to enter on a more determined conflict 
 with the forces of social evil than it has ever yet waged. There are 
 many thousands of the best intellects, and the stoutest hearts in 
 Christendom, some of them even within the Churches, who have 
 never bowed the knee to Baal, and who are ready to spend and to 
 be spent to the uttermost, in a united fraternal effort to establish 
 the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and to demonstrate that the 
 author and finisher of their faith, the Blessed Nazarene, was no 
 "dreamer," but economically as spiritually the Way, the Truth, 
 and the Life. — I am, etc., 
 
 J. MORRISON DAVIDSON. 
 
 Democratic Club, Essex Street, Jan. 17th, 1S93. 
 
 THE EDITOR OF "THE D.A.ILY CHRONICLE." 
 
 Sir. — I sincerely rejoice that you have seen your way to allow this 
 profoundly interesting question to be further discussed in your 
 columns. It is such a comfort to get away from the dreary St. 
 Stephen's play-actors and their doings for the briefest season. Not 
 one of your correspondents, nor one of the preachers whose sermons 
 were reported in Monday's paper, has dared to face the real issue. 
 To me at least that issue is as clear as a sunbeam. Christ, whatever 
 else He may have been, was beyond all question an Anarchist -Com- 
 munist, if there ever was one. It is true He sanctioned, though
 
 APPENDIX. 155 
 
 gradgingly, the payment of tribute to Caesar, but that was only part 
 of His marvellous, all-embracing philosophy of life. One may wel 
 pay taxes to the State, if it is one's duty when one's coat is requis- 
 tioned to give one's vest also. 
 
 In the ancient world, among masters and slaves alike, the lex talionis 
 universally obtained — " an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." 
 Crassus acted on it, so did Spartacus. But that rule of conduct 
 Christ exactly reversed. He announced that evil was not to be 
 overcome by evil, but by good, and that good in concrete form. 
 Mr. Buchanan's desiderated "orb of rational polity" wiXi the 
 "commune pure and simple." 
 
 The "world" which Christ came to combat by word and deed 
 was the institution of private property, with all its monstrous, but- 
 tressing paraphernalia of "sovereigns and statesmen," lords and 
 commons, armies and navies, priests and parsons, judges and 
 policemen, prisons and workhouses, banks, insurance offices, stock 
 exchanges, and Liberator Societies. He dissolved the whole fabric 
 of the " society " which we are all vainly struggling to keep from 
 falling to pieces about our ears. The Princes of the Gentiles hear 
 dominion over them, and their great ones exercise authority upon them, but 
 among you [Christians] it shall not be so. He that ivould be greatest 
 among you, let him be the least. Let him be the servant 0/ all. 
 
 The test of admission to the Kingdom of Heaven on earth was, 
 Sell all you have and give to the poor, and join this communistic 
 society which I have founded, where the distinction of meum andtuu7n 
 no longer exists. That was the leaven that was to leaven the whole 
 lump of suffering humanity. 
 
 It has, alas ! not done so ; but surely the " failure " is not Christ's 
 but ours. I can in some measure understand the all but "uncon- 
 ceivable ignorance " of men like Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Foote, of 
 the National Secular Society (whose out of date occupation I haa 
 hoped was by this time gone), but the attitude of "Christian" 
 bishops, with their public palaces, pitroaage, and big incomes, 
 and even of prosperous Dissenting Nonconformist stipendiaries of 
 the altar, beggars me entirely. In the name of the vagrant 
 Nazarene, who had not where to lay his head, I say to all such — 
 
 By the Shades beneath us, and by the Gods above. 
 Add not unto your cruel hate your yet more cruel love. 
 
 The Gospel of Him who dared to say. He that hath seen Me hath seen 
 tke Father, was to be without money and without price, and lo ! ^
 
 156 APPENDIX. 
 
 bas been converted by the " classes " into the subject matter of one 
 pf the genteel professions ! 
 
 It is all very sad, Mr. Editor. " The prophets prophesy falsely ; 
 by them the priests bear rule, and my people love to have it so." 
 Anyhow, Sir, you have done the world an inestimable service by 
 opening the columns of The Daily Chronicle to the many earnest souls 
 who have written to you, and you may depend that, though the 
 fullness of time is not yet, God will arise, ani His enemies shall be 
 scattered. — I am, &c. J- ^- ^' 
 
 Jan. 24th, 1893. 
 
 THE EDITOR OF "THE DAILY CHRONICLE." 
 
 Sir,— I had not intended to write a word more in this unexampled 
 controversy, but to leave it to my grand sahreur compatriot, Mr. 
 Buchanan, to sum up the situation. Some friends, however, think 
 Ihat it would be well that I should say a few words in reply to Mr. 
 G. W. Foote's quasi-personal, "secularist" — papal rescript, in 
 Saturday's issue, and with your permission I shall briefly do so. 
 
 He does not like my reiteration of the fact that, so far at least aa 
 this world is concerned, communism pure and simple is tha 
 Christianity of Christ. He cannot deny it, but he holds up his 
 hands in astonishment that I should claim as upholders of that 
 "orb of rational polity" so much desiderated by Mr. Buchanan, 
 St. Simon, Proudhon, Rodbertus, Lassalle and Marx, of whom he 
 dentures to say, "and there was 7iot a Christian among them!" 
 
 That was obviously not my point, which was that if Christ were 
 not "intellectually" competent to think out an effecti%-e scheme 
 for the emancipation of suffering humanity, neither were those 
 acknowledged brain-giants who painfully expressed His all-embrac- 
 ing dicta in terms of modern industriaHsm. 
 
 But to Mr. Foote it is given to know who are Christians and who 
 are not ; from me that knowledge is withheld. I am content to 
 accept the authority that " those who not having the law, do by 
 nature the things contained in the law, are a law unto themselves." 
 Nay, I go to a yet higher authority, and say, "It is not they that 
 call me Lord, Lord, that shall be saved, but those who do the will 
 of my Father who is in heaven." Indeed, I should greatly 
 hesitate to say that the president of the National Secular Society 
 himself was not naturaliley Clmstianus
 
 APPENDIX. 157 
 
 Mr. Foote is good enough to instruct me regarding the Essenes, 
 who, he admonishes me, " were a numerous communistic society 
 before the formation of any Christian Church ; in fact, before the 
 apostolate of Christ.' If Mr. Foote cares to turn to my little book 
 
 The Old Order and the New," he will find a pretty full account of 
 (he Essenes, but they were never, as he says, a "numerous society," 
 Philo reckons them at 4,000, and their ante-dating Christ's 
 apostolate, though it may be inferred, cannot be proved. 
 
 Anyhow, so far as I am concerned, the point is of no consequence 
 whatever, for my Christianity is at least as comprehensive as that 
 of St. Augustine, who held that "that which is called the Christian 
 religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist from the plant- 
 ing of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the 
 true religion, which already subsisted, began to be called Christianity." 
 
 On one point I am entirely at one with Mr. Foote — the utter 
 utility of other.worldliness. We are as much in eternity now as we 
 ever have been or ever shall be. The Kingdom of Heaven is withia 
 us here and now, or nowhere, and the " selfishness of salvation " 
 in another world, apart from the most determined effort to abolish 
 the environment which produces so much needless sorrow and 
 suffering on earth, is to me anathema. My sole prayer in this 
 momentous issue is that of the "Third Voice in the night" in 
 Tennyson's " Queen Mary." 
 
 "Third Voice: What am i ? One who cries continually with 
 sweat and tears to the Lord God that it would please Him out of 
 His infinite love to break down ingship and queenship, all 
 
 priesthood and prelacy ; to cancel and abolish all bonds of human 
 allegiance, all the magistracy, all the nobles, and all the wealthy, 
 and to send us again, according to his promise, the one King, the 
 Christ, and all things jn common, as in the days of the first 
 Church, when Christ Jesus was King."— I am, &c. J. M, D. 
 
 Jan. 30th, 1893. 
 
 PS —One word regarding my alleged "anonymous defamation " 
 of the late Mr. Charles Bradlaugh. I have never written a word 
 anonymously for the last quarter of a century, when I could avoid 
 it, and I have never written a line during that long stretch of 
 journalistic experience to which I would not willingly subscribe my 
 name at this moment. All who know me are aware that this is so.
 
 APPENDIX II. 
 
 "TIRED OF LIFE." 
 
 THE EDITOR OF " THE DAILY CHRONICLE." 
 
 Sir, — "To be or not to be, that is the question," of the houi 
 it would seem. Master Ernest Clark, aged twenty-three, carpet- 
 designer in particular and aesthete in general, has " suicided " 
 because, as he tells us, he " resolved long ago, that life is a series ol 
 shams." "Shams" ! A series of grim tragedies, rather, I should 
 say, in which Ernest like the rest of us was called upon to play a 
 man's part, but conspicuously did not. " The ugliness and monotony 
 of life crowded beauty out," and so Ernest thought to mend matters 
 by putting a leaden bullet in its place, much to the satisfaction appar- 
 ently of William Archer, " dramatic critic," and "lethal chamber " 
 advocate. 
 
 Said William, having critically examined Ernest's letter to 
 The Daily Chronicle announcing his abrupt exit from amongst us, 
 hastens to pronounce it " simple and manly." I wonder if he ever 
 heard of the Parisian who was found one morning dangling from a 
 tree with this terse explanation pinned to the breast of his coat — 
 " Born a man, but died a grocer." Here was not merely simplicity 
 and manliness for you, but a certain measure of grim epigrammatic 
 humour into the bargain ; a sort of grave and gay life — Iliad in a 
 nutshell. The grocer had doubtless like most of us. sufiered from 
 "lack of advancement," had, peradventure, more creditors than 
 customers, but he did not question the reality of the manhood to 
 which he aspired, though the stubborn grocery environment unfor- 
 tunately rendered it unattainable. He was not a sceptic he was 
 only a " failure " ; and there are, alas ! in this world of competition 
 many such.
 
 APPENDIX. 159 
 
 But our dramatic critic's hypochondriac young hero was " not 
 built that way." Ernest was not a "failure" so far, but nothing 
 was good enough for his morbid self-love. He declined to follow the 
 advice of two of the woi'ld's greatest intellectual benefactors — Voltaire 
 and Carlyle— and betake himself to "hard work," because that, 
 forsooth, was an " anaesthetic " which might take in two such old 
 fogeys as the sages of Forney and Chelsea, but not hivi, the knowing 
 one that he was ! The " Socialists " likewise were naught. " They 
 look forward to society with brains and love, but there will always 
 be the animal in and out of us to fight with," and our virtuous 
 "transcendental" Ernest must needs decline the unholy combat. 
 The little valorous Jew, St. Paul, we know, "fought with wild 
 beasts at Ephesus," but his " ideals," if he had any, were of the 
 earth, earthy, mayhap. As for "religions" they failed to demonstrate 
 to Krnest's mature intelligence the immortality of the soul, and were 
 therefore of no account. Woman also was discovered to be a 
 fraudulent siren, malevolently contrived " to keep man here," but 
 Ernest being more than man saw through the snare and incontinently 
 took himself off, " the grief of my darling, the most sacred thing life 
 has given me." notwithstanding. 
 
 Such I maintain, is a perfectly fair analysis of what Mr. Archer 
 is pleased to call a " simple, manly letter," on the strength of which, 
 and for the behoof of such sickly, maudlin cranks, he would put the 
 community to theexpenseof erecting convenient " lethal chambers ' 
 with adjoining crematoria ! 
 
 Indeed, of Ernest's letter and William's, William's seems to me to' 
 carry off the palm for sheer contemptible /wrf^sw/esentimentalism 
 sceptical cant, and irresponsible moral frivolity. If dramatic 
 criticism has the effect of reducing the mind of a presumably sane 
 man to such palpable chaos, the art ought, for the good of mankind, 
 to be banished from the fdce of the earth, drama, theatre, and all 
 To tell the truth when I read Mr. Archer's letter my first impression 
 was that it was some ghastly joke he was playing off on the much- 
 enduring British public, and it was not till he imparted the fact that 
 he could not transcribe a few lines on suicide from Dryden — for the 
 most part an exceedingly artificial and even mechanical, poet, by the 
 way— without shedding tears of self-pity worthy of a boarding school 
 "Miss " that it dawned on me that he might be in earnest after all- 
 Exception is taken by some to the stereotyped " Crowner's 
 'quest " verdict of " temporary insanity " pronounced on Ernest 
 Clark ; but, though inexuct, it was at least humane, and, in sucb
 
 l60 APPENDIX. 
 
 cases, humanity s every way better than logic. The verdict of 
 reason would have been something like this — " Committed suicide 
 in consequence of confirmed mental disease, the offspring of abound- 
 ing conceit, intense egoism, and 'a little learning.'" It may seem 
 harsh to write thus ; but, so far as was disclosed by the evidence, 
 the youth had positively no " fardels" whatever to bear except such 
 as were coined in the mint of his own capricious imagination. A 
 few touches of real hardship, such as thousands on thousands in 
 the East-end of London and elsewhere stoically endure, week in' 
 and week out, would have done him a world of good by teaching 
 him to sympathise with the untold woes of the struggling " masses,* 
 who have no time to brood over the trumpery " aesthetic " miseries 
 which loomed so large in his distorted vision. 
 
 Mr. Archer is at a loss to discover the " sin " of suicide, or where 
 it is condemned in the Scriptures. But the truth is suicide may be 
 a " sin" or a "saving grace "according as the motive is selfish or 
 unselfish. Take, for example, the case of not a few captive victims 
 of Austrian and Russian imperial despotism — heroic Poles, 
 Italians, Russians — who even in our own day have dashed out their 
 brains against their dungeon walls, not from any craven dread of 
 torture, but from fear lest, under its influence, they might, in some 
 moment of delirium, reveal the names of comrades still at large, and 
 so involuntarily sacrifice " the cause " of the oppressed. He would 
 be a stern moralist indeed who would- condemn, nay, who would 
 not heartily applaud, suicide under such untoward circu mstances. 
 I would even, in the face of such a real tragedy, permit Mr. Archer, 
 if he cared, to " take out the plug," and weep to his heart's 
 content. 
 
 But your " aesthetic " suicides of the Canterbury and Liverpool- 
 street Station pattern have neither part nor lot in such afifairs of 
 high emprise. They are base, cowardly deserters from the 
 battle, who throw down their arms in face of the common enemy,, 
 and take refuge in ignominous flight. This, the Christian view ol 
 the selfish " Tired of Life" suicide, gives mortal offence, I observe 
 to Mr. Harold Frederic, who, in support of the "dramatic critic's " 
 epistolary antics, makes a long excursus into pagan theories of 
 self-destruction. He evidently thinks these were of an enlightened 
 order, almost up to Mr. Archer's grave" penny-in-the-slot " sugges- 
 tion. To any one, however, really conversant with antiquity, it 
 will at once be evident that he is a mere special pleader, whose 
 large statements must be taken with many grains of salt. But even
 
 APPENDIX. Z6Z 
 
 were it otherwise, "the Greek philosophy and graces, whose 
 submerging under the acrid flood of theocratic Semitism " Mr. 
 Frederic so keenly deplores, had brought the empire of the Cajsars 
 before Christ's advent to such a hopeless pass of cruelty and lust that 
 even wise men might be excused for having recourse to Hamlet's 
 "bare bodkin." 
 
 On that hard pagan world disgust, 
 
 And secret loathing fell ; 
 Deep weariness and sated lust 
 
 Made human life a hell. 
 
 In his cool hall with haggared eyes, 
 
 The Roman n oble lay ; 
 He drove abroad in furious guise 
 
 Along the Appian way. 
 
 He made a feast, drank fierce and fast. 
 
 And crowned his hair with flowers- 
 No easier, nor no quicker pass'd 
 
 The impracticable hours. 
 
 But, thank God, bad as our condition is to-day, we are a con- 
 si'ierable way off the impenetrable gloom that enveloped the Gra;co- 
 Roman world. We know the root of this suicidal manii, and 
 are confident that it can and will be extirpated, if not by us, then in 
 the name of the Blessed Nazarene, by those more fortunate 
 "grandsons and great-grandsons" of ours, whom Mr. Archer so 
 liberally dowers with parochial "lethal chambers" and crematoria. 
 Deliberate suicide is simply the ultimate expression of mori- 
 bund individualism — of the competitive system of production and 
 distribution. 
 
 Within a comparatively brief period ten men of good culture, with 
 whom I was more or less intimately acquainted have committed 
 suicide. None of them "wrote to the newspapers" about the 
 manner or reason of their going and only one of them engaged the 
 attention of a coroner's jury ; but all of them succumbed directly or 
 indirectly to the fierce strain put upon them by the cruel Moloch 
 of competition. " Disgust and secret loathing " fell upon them 
 they hardly knew why ; but alas ! they fell. They were wearied 
 with competition which means war, and they were unable to embrace 
 co-operation which means /^rt<r^. 
 
 Six of them were professed Christians ; but not one of the six — 
 and therein assuredly they were not singular — could be made to 
 comprehend Christ's cardinal mission on earth, or their end would 
 have been otherwise. That mission was to dethrone the brute god 
 
 I
 
 1 62 APPENDIX. 
 
 of this world, "Mammon," otherwise to uproot the baleful institution 
 of "private property" the modern synonym of Mammon. There- 
 fore it was that He said, "Come unto me all ye that are weary and 
 heavy laden and I will give you rest." He sought to eradicate self, 
 or "covetousness," from the human heart, and with it "private 
 property," which is merely its organised expression. 
 
 All Collectivists, whether they know it or not, are His followers, 
 and are busy laying the foundations of the Kingdom of God on earth, 
 of which He was the harbinger. In this sacred work the despondent 
 find a new happiness, all petty differences of creed, and even method, 
 are forgotten, and a true all embracing Human Church is being 
 slowly evolved — a beneficent church which will make Mr. Archer's 
 suicidal clients' "lethal chambers" and penny-in-the-slot reforms 
 look very ridiculous objects indeed. 
 
 Let me put a new, a better, and a more wholesome song into his 
 mouth than any he seems to be in the habit of hearing in the 
 unreal realms of theatre-land 
 
 I will not cease from mental strife. 
 
 Nor let the sword sleep in my hand, 
 Till we have built Jerusalem 
 In England's green and pleasant land. 
 
 I am, &c., 
 
 J. MORRISON DAVIDSON. 
 Democratic Club, Essex-street, Aug. 22nd, 1893.
 
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 THE 
 
 ANNALS OF TOIL 
 
 BEING 
 
 OLabour Ibistor^ ©utlines, IRoman auD :Britisb 
 
 IN FOUR PARTS, 
 
 BY 
 
 J. MORRISON DAVIDSON 
 
 (0/ the Middle Templt), Barrister-at-Law, 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 " The Old Order and the New," " The New Book of Kings," " The 
 Gospel of the Poor," " Let There be Light," etc. 
 
 PART I. — The Lot of the Ancient Labourer — Celtic Britain — The Domesday 
 Book, etc. — Mediaeval " Classes" and " Masses." 
 
 PART IL — The Peasants' Revolt— Cade's Rebellion— Protestantism and 
 Pauperism — Commonwealth, Cromwell and Collectivism. 
 
 PART in. — Eve of the Capitalist Regime (1660-1760) — The Coming of the 
 Capitalists — Cliartists and Chartism. 
 
 PART IV. — Trade-Unionism and Co-operation — Neo-Socialist "Origins" — 
 Socialists and Socialisms — Realities, Probabilities, and Possibilities. 
 
 PRESS NOTICES. 
 
 "An earnest, entertaining, and eminently weighty compilation by a thoughtful Scotsman." 
 — Outlook. 
 
 " Two things strike the reviewer — the enormous amount of historical information lodged in 
 the mind of John Morrison Davidson, and the entire single-hearted devotion of the same 
 Morrison Davidson to the Democratic Cause." — The New Age. 
 
 " Mr. Davidson is an iconoclast, if ever one were. Every national idol we have he knocks 
 down from its pedestal. . . . ' The Annals of Toil ' contains much interesting information of 
 a curious out-of-the-way kind. Its author has evidently devoted both time and thought to 
 his work ; unfortunately, however, he has allowed his sympathy for the Poor and hatred of 
 the Rich to lead him astray." — Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 F. R. HENDERSON, 26 Patirnoster Square, London, E.G.
 
 ANNALS OF TOIL.— PRESS NOTICES— Coniimud. 
 
 " Mr. Davidson's book fairly teems with facts which will be of immense use to all who have 
 to write or speak on industrial questions." — Notiifi^ham Daily Express. 
 
 " The work is written with the vigour and acumen which are characteristic of Mr. David- 
 son's discussion of social, political, and industrial subjects." — Dumfries Standard. 
 
 " Whilst Mr. Davidson is caustic to excess in his comments, he has obviously been a care- 
 ful and painstaking student and searcher for the facts which he may at times see in a rather 
 exaggerated light. The author gives us a vast quantity of information as to the habits and 
 conditions of labourers from early times, which is culled from the greatest authorities. We 
 would advise the student to take advantage of Mr. Davidson's wide reading." — Bradford 
 Observer. 
 
 "Mr. Davidson is an out-and-out Democrat and Republican. An index might have made 
 some of the material he has collected from a wide course of reading of some use. Without 
 an index it is of little or no use, except to those who are fired by the unswerving democratic 
 purpose which has actuated its author." — Scotsman. 
 
 " This is one of those curious books which press history into the ser\'ice of a revolutionary 
 movement, and transplant to the remote past all the furious passions of to-day." — Guardian. 
 
 "The 'Annals of Toil' is undoubtedly a book which will be very widely read. The 
 chapters are all written in that style which indelibly identifies them with the author." — 
 Western Daily Mercury. 
 
 "This volume shows the same care, industry, charm of style, and felicity of treatment 
 which Morrison Davidson brings to bear on all his literary work. As a storehouse of facts, 
 and an argument for Democracy, it will be welcomed by all interested in the Condition of the 
 People Question." — Reynolds's Newspaper. 
 
 "Much valuable data for the use of students, speakers, and writers on the Labour 
 Problem is contained in the book, and the information is both concisely and conveniently ar- 
 ranged. The general reader, too, will probably find in these ' Labour Outlines ' much that will 
 interest him, and maybe instruct." — Sheffield Independent. 
 
 "We do not quarrel with Mr. Davidson's facts so much as with his utter lack of the historic 
 sense and his vulgar invective, which will prevent them from influencing any really intelligent 
 Workman. Such a book as this makes one despair of solving the Social Problem." — The 
 Methodist Times. 
 
 "Apart altogether from the economic preaching that runs through them, these terrible 
 ' Annals of Toil ' are of the first importance to the student of Historj'. . . . Set down in 
 manner as vivid and graphic as that of a skilled romancer." — Mornino Leader. 
 
 " No one knows the History of Labour better than Morrison Davidson, and no one can tell 
 the Story of Labour in a more attractive way. The chapters treating of Modern Labour 
 Movements are full of that fine blend of good sense and keenly intelligent criticism which is 
 characteristic of the author. The book contains as frontispiece a capital portrait of the 
 veteran." — Dundee A aver User. 
 
 " Mr. Davidson wages fierce war with Mr. J. R. Green, the historian. . . . Shakespeare is 
 denounced as ' a venal scribe ' because he did not sufficiently recognise the wisdom and virtue 
 of Wat Tyler. Cromwell, too, has a bad time of it at Mr. Davidson's hands. In fact, every- 
 body who ever succeeded in doing anything except getting himself hanged or knocked on the 
 bead, or politically extinguished, was a more or less untrustworthy person." — Morning 
 Post. 
 
 •' Looking back on the pages of history, Mr. Davidson chiefly sees the toiling people and 
 them crucified. But he has always been an Idealist, able to draw on the bank ol faith, know- 
 ing that the things that are seen are temporal, and that many a disaster rnust happen before 
 Jerusalem is builded. Mr. Davidson never minces his words, and occasionally he goes too 
 far. But there is such faith, such hopeful idealism, such firm adherence to principles not 
 lightly adopted, such occasional flashes of insight, such divine sympathy with all who suffer, 
 that we overlook faults, and gladly welcome such a work as an eloquent, if not in all respects 
 convincing, statement of a side which has had but few champions among the elegant writers 
 of history for the genteel cKisses of Society.''— Late William Clarke in Daily Chronicle. 
 
 " Mr. Davidson writes with a wealth of invective that is apt to react on his own cause, but 
 at the same time with force and, above all, with knowledge." — Star. 
 
 " The ' Annals of Toil ' is the spasmodic work of a clever and well-read man. In fact, Mr. 
 Davidson so raves, recites, and maddens through History and Economics that, though he 
 appears to be often foaming at the mouth, he may be just as likely as not laughing in his 
 sleeve." — Glasgow Herald. 
 
 F. R. HENDERSON, 26 PATERNOSTER Square, London, E.C.
 
 Crown 8vo, pp. x. +171, Cloth Gilt, 2s, net ; Cheap Edition, is. net. 
 
 Let There Be Light ! 
 
 New^ Politics for the People 
 
 BY 
 
 J. MORRISON DAVIDSON 
 
 (0/ the Middle Temple), 
 
 BARRISTER-AT-LAW, 
 
 Author of " The Old Order and the New" " The New Book of Kings," " The Gospel 
 of the Poor" " The Annats of Toil," etc., etc. 
 
 SHORT LIST OF CONTENTS: 
 
 Communion of Saints. Christian Profession and Practice. Religion of 
 Collectivism. Non-Conformist Conscience. Labour Churches. Costs 
 of Cant. Labourism v. Liberalism. National Labour Parliament. 
 Politics Without Politicians. Initiative and Referendum. What is 
 Anarchy ? Anarchy and Outrage. Give the Woman a Latch-key ! 
 Rights of Natural Children. Communism and the Family. The 
 "New Woman." "Triumphant Democracy." The Poor Man's 
 Bank. Inferno of War. Pauper Suffrage. "Tender Mercies of the 
 Wicked." Royal Christening. 
 
 The Daily Telegraph says : " Mr. Morrison Davidson is one of those 
 exasperating authors who are the despair of reviewers. His style is a pure 
 example of English, and yet his arguments are such as would set at least a 
 dozen groups of advanced theorists at variance. His latest production is * Let 
 There be Light ! ' and it means that the theories he deduces from the text 
 ought to be submitted to the ordeal of everyday life ; and if the latter be 
 unequal to the trial, so much the worse for it. Mr. Davidson writes so well 
 that it is always a pleasure to disagree with him." 
 
 Leo Tolstoy says: "The whole book is penetrated by a true Christian 
 spirit, which invites to action, and not to submission to, or adaptation of, the 
 present state of things." 
 
 F. R. HENDERSON, 26 Paternoster Square, London, E.G.
 
 By J. MORRISON DAVIDSON 
 
 (Of the Middle Temple )^ 
 
 BARRISTER-AT-LAW, 
 
 Author of ^^ Annals of Toil" "Let There be Light" " Politics for the People" "The 
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 Price, 6d. net ; Clotli, Is 6d. net. 
 
 THE BOOK OF LORDS 
 
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 "The 'New Book of Kings' and the 'Book of Lords.' Oh ! that the 
 children in the schools of Great Britain and Ireland could be favoured with 
 copies of each of these valuable books." — Irish World. 
 
 " I have just been reading Mr. Morrison Davidson's two writings, the 
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 a grandly-simple eloquence, with a straightforward earnestness he tells his 
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