Christianity and the Social Crisis; A Theology for the Social Gospel

Ail the teachfng of Jesus and all his thinking centred about the hope of the kingdom of God. His moral teachings get their rem meaning only when viewed from that centre. He was nota Greek philosopher or Hindu pundit teaching the individual the way of emancipation from the world and its passions, but a Hebrew prophet preparing men for the righteous social order. The goodness which he sought to create in men was always the goodness that would enable them to lire rightly with their fellow-men and to constitute a true social life. All human goodness must be social goodness. Man is fundamentally gregarious and his morality consists in being a good member of his community. A man is moral when he is social; he is immoral when he is anti-social. The highest type of goodness is that which puts frecly at the service of the community all that a mari is and can. The highest type of badness is that which uses up the wealth and happiness and virtue of the community to please self. All this ought to go without saying, but in fact religious ethics in the past bas largely spent its force in detaching men from their community, from marriage and property, from interest in political and social tasks. The fundamental vil'tue in the ethics of Jesus was love, because love is the society-making quality. Human life originates in love. It is love that holds together the basal human organization, the family. The physical expression of all love and friendship is the desire to get together and be together. Love creates fellowship. In the measure in which love increases in any social organism, it will hold together without coercion. If physical coercion is constantly necessary, itis proof that the social organiza-

The n dom of G and the e ics of Jesl

tion has not evoked the power of human affection and fraternity. Hence when Jesus prepared men for the nobler social order of the kingdom of God, he tried to energize the faculty and habits of love and to stimulate the dormant faculty of devotion to the common good. Love with Jesus was nota flickering and wayward emotion, but the highest and most steadfast energy of a will bent on creating fellowship. The force of that unitive will is best seen where fellowship is in danger of disruption. If a man has offended us, that fact is not to break up our fraternity, but we must forgive and forgive and forgive, and always stand ready to repair the torn tissues of fellowship. 1 If we remember that we have offended and our brother is now alienated from us, we are to drop everything, though it be the sacrifice we are jut offering in the temple, and go and re-create fellowship. - If a maI hates us or persecutes and reviles us, we must refuse to let fraternity be ruined, and must woo him back with love and blessings. 3 If he smites us in the face, we must turn the other cheek instead of doubling the barrier by returning the blow. 4 These are not hard and fast laws or detached rules of conduct. If they are used as such, they become tmworkable and ridiculous. They are simply the most emphatic expressions of the determination that the fraternal relation which binds men together must not be ruptured. If a child can be saved from its unsocial self-will only by spanking it, parental love will have to apply that medicine. If a rough young fellow will be a happier member of society for being knocked down, we must knock him down and then sit down t Matthew 18. 21-22.  Matthew 5- 43-48. 2 Matthew 5- 23-24- 4 Matthew 5- 38-42-

THE SOCAL AIMS OF JESUS 6 9 beside him and make a social man of him. The law of love transcends all other laws. It does hOt stop where they stop, and occasionally it may cut right across their beaten tracks. When Mary of Bethany broke the alabaster jar of ointment, the disciples voiced the ordinary law of conduct: it was wasteful luxury; the money might have fed the poor. Jesus took her side. While the disciples were thinking of the positions they were to get when their toaster became king, her feminine intuition had seen the storm-cloud lowering over his head and had heard the mute cry for sympathy in his soul, and had given him the best she had in the abandonment of love. "This is a beautiful deed that she has done." The instinct of love had been a truer guide of conduct than all machine-marie rules of charity, t Jesus was very sociable. He was always falling into conversation with people, sometimes in calm disregard of the laws of propriety. When his disciples returned to him at the well of Samaria, they were surprised to find him talking with a woman! 2 Society had agreed to ostracize certain classes, for instance the tax-collectors. Jesus refused to recognize such a partial negation of human society. He accepted their invitations to dinner and inrited himself to their houses, thereby incurring the sneer of the respectable as a frîend of publicans and a glutton and wine-drinker. 3 He wanted men to lire as neighbors and brothers and he set the example. Social meals are often referred to in the gospels and furnished him the illustrations for much of his teaching. 4 His meals with his disciples had been so important a matter in their lire that they continued them after his death. His t Mark 14. 3-9. s Matthew II. 19. John 4- 2. * Lukc 14.

manner in breaking the bread for them all had been so characteristic that they recognized him by it after his resurrection. 1 One of the two great ritual acts in the Church grew out of his last social meal with his friends. If we have ever felt how it brings men together to put their feet under the saine table, we shall realize that in these elements of Christ's life a new communal sociability was working its way and creating a happy human society, and Jesus refused to surrender so great an attainment to the ordinary laws of fasting. 2 Pride disrupts society. Love equalizes. Humility freely takes its place as a simple member of the commtmity. When Jesus found the disciples disputing about their rank in the kingdom, he rebuked their divisive spirit of pride by setting a little child among them as their model; 3 for an unspoiled child is the most social creature, swift to make friends, happy in play with others, lonely without human love. When Jesus overheard the disciples quarrelling about the chief places at the last meal, he gave them a striking object lesson in the subordination of self to the service of the commtmity, by washing their dusty sandalled feet. 4 All these acts and sayings receive their real meaning when we think of them in connection with the kingdom of God, the ideal human society tobe established. Instead of a society resting on coercion, exploitation, and inequality, Jesus desired to round a society resting on love, service, and equality. These new principles were so much the essence of his character and of his view of life, that he lived them out spontaneously and taught them in everything that he touched in his conversations or public addresses. God is a father; men l Luke 24. 3o-31. a Mark o. 33-37- z Mark 2. x8-I 9. * Luke 22. 24-30; John 13. x-2o.

are neighbors and brothers; let them act accordingly. Let them love, and then life will be true and good. Let them seek the ldngdom, and 11 things would follow. Under no circumstance let them surfer fellowship to be permanently disrupted. If an individual or a class was outside of fraternal relations, he set himself to heal the breach. The kingdom of God is the true human society; the ethics of Jesus taught the true social conduct which would create the true society. This would be Christ's test for any custom, law, or institution: does it draw men together or divide them?

In our study of the Old Testament prophets, we saw that indifference or hostility to ritual religion was a characteristic of prophetic religion, and that this turned the full power of the religious impulse into the sluice of ethical conduct. Jesus was a successor of the prophets in this regard. He used the temple as a place to meet men. He valued the temple as a house of prayer and fiercely resented the intrusion of the money-making spirit within it. t But otherwise it was of no religious importance to him. According to the Gospel of John he foretold a stage of religion in which the old burning issue of the true place of worship would be antiquated and dead. * Stephen, who understood Jesus better than most of the apostles, had scant reverence for the temple, s The temple sacrifices are mentioned by Jesus only to say that the duty of fraternal reconciliation takes precedence of the duty of proceeding with sacrificial ritual. 4 Since the Exile and the dispersion of the people, the minor and personal acts of ritual had really become of greateÆ I Mark xx. xS-x 9. * Acts 6. 14, 7. 44-5o. John 4- x9-4- • Matthew 5- 3-4 •

Inslsten( on condl and indi ence to ritual.

from his clean and traditions itself. 1 practical importance in the lire of the Jews than the temple sacrifices. About some of these minor ritual acts Jesus was in perpetual collision with the guardians of customary piety. They did violence to human needs to keep the Sabbath intact. They wanted men to look solemn and fast in contrition even when they were happy in God. They concentrated attention on the things that a man must not touch and eat for fear of ceremonial defilement, and thereby made men indifferent to moral defilement. Jesus on the other hand held that the Sabbath was made to serve man, not to break him; that a man should fast onlv when fasting was the fit outward expression of his inward state of mind; and that no outward contact with tabooed things would make any difference in the moral status of a man, for that is determined only by the good or evil thoughts and impulses which proceed own soul. In his indifference to the law of unclean food he not only brushed aside the of the elders, but contradicted the sacred Law

These religious duties were supposed to serve God. Jesus was indifferent to them when they did not serve men, and hostile to them when they harmed men. He ridiculed the models of piety who were so punctilious about ritual observances and so indifferent to wrong moral relations. They faithfully gave a tithe of everything to religion, down to the mint, anise, and cummin in their garden-beds, but such little things as justice and mercy and good faith, the qualifies on which human society tests and which constitute the rem burden of the Law, they quite overlooked. 1 When he saw a Pharisee straining the milk lest haply he should swallow a drowned gnat and so transgress the Law in eating a strangled beast, he saw there a type of what these religious men were doing all the time: straining out gnats and swallowing camels. 2 They wiped the outside of the platter, but within it was "filled with extortion and excess"; their food was acquired by injustice and consumed in. luxury. 3 Thus religion, which ought tobe the source of morality, drugged and blinded the moral judgment, so that the very teachers of religion locked the door of the kingdom of God in men's faces. 4 They even nullified the fundamental obligation of the child to the parent by teaching that if a man gave money to the temple, and thus supported the ritual worship of God, he was free from the duty of supporting his parents) Thus religion had become a parasite on the body of morality and was draining it instead of feeding it. This revolutionary attitude to inherited religion, which so jarred the earnest and painstaking representatives of traditional piety, is explained by Christ's conception of the Mngdom of God. They thought it was a Jewish affair and would rest on careful religious observances. He thought it was a human affair and would rest on right human relations. He would tolerate nothing that hallowed wrong, not even religion. He had no patience with religious thought which hampered the attainment of a right social lire. To them the written Law inherited from the past was the supreme thing; to Jesus the better human lire to be established in the future was the supreme thing. 1 Matthew 23. 23. * Mattbew 23. r 3. 2 Matthew 23. 24. s Mark 7- I-I3.  Matthew 23. 25-26.

Like all the greatest spiritual teachers of mankind, Jesus realized a profound danger to the better self in the pursuit of wealth. Whoever will watch the development of a soul that has bent its energies to the task of becoming rich, can see how perilous the process is to the fmer sense of justice, to the instinct of mercy and kindness and equality, and to the singleness of devotion to higher ends; in short, to all the higher humanity in us. It is a simple fact: "Ye cannot serve God and mammon;" each requires the best of a man. "The cares of this life and the deceitfulness of riches"— note that quality of deceitfulness — will choke the good seed like tank weeds which appropriate soil and sunshine for their own growth. I When a man lays up treasure, his heart almost inevitably is with his treasure. Then gradually the inner light in him is darkened; the eye of his conscience is filmed and blurred. 2 Wealth is apt to grow stronger than the man who owns it. It owns him and he loses his moral and spiritual freedom. The spirit of the world is always deluding men into thinking that "a man's life consisteth in the abundance of things that he possesseth," 3 but when he builds his life on that theory, he is lost to the kingdom of God. And the worst of it is that he does not know it. The harlot and the drunkard have their hours of remorse and selfabasement; the covetous man does not even know that he is on the downward way. Saint Francis Xavier, the noble Jesuit missionary, said that in the confessional men had confessed to him all sins that he knew and some that he had never imagined, but none had ever of his own accord confessed that he was covetous. But Jesus did not fear riches merely as a narcotc soult Matthew 13. 22.  Matthew 6. I9-$4.  Luke i2. I 5.

poison. In hfs desire to create a true human society he encountered riches as a prime divisive force in actual lire. It wedges society apart in horizontal strata between which real fellow-feeling is paralyzed. It lifts individuals out of the wholesorne dependence on their fellows and equally out of the full sense of responsibility to them. That is the charm of riches and their curse. This is the key to the conversation of Jesus with the ric" young man, who was so honestly and lovably anxious to have a share in the Messianic salvation, t He could truthfully say that he had lived a good life. Jesus accepted his staternent, but if he would be perfect, he bade him get rid of his wealth and join the cornpany of the disciples. This demand has been understood either as a test or as a cure. Some think that it was rnerely a test; if he had consented to give up his wealth, it would not have been necessary to give it up. Sorne think it was a cure for the love of rnoney which was really needed in this exceptional case. On either supposition the advice concerned merely this young rnan's soul; it was rnedicine to be swallowed by hirn for his own good alone. But Jesus immediately rises from this concrete case to the general assertion that itis hard for any rich man to enter the kingdorn of God, harder than for a camel to wedge through the eye of a needle. The young man who was departing with clouded face was sirnply a dernonstratîon of a general fact. Clearly here was a case where the heart was anchored toits treasure. The solution for this "hard saying" has been sought in the remark quoted only in Mark:  "How hard it is for them that trust in riches to enter the kingdorn." A man may have * Mark o. i7-3x.  Mark io. 34.

riches safely, if only he will hot trust in them for salvation, It is easy to satisfy that requirement. But unfortunately the best manuscripts do hOt contain the phrase about trusting The critical editions of the Greek text drop it or place it in the margin. Some early copyist probably felt as anxious to dull the sharpness of the saying as some modern preachers. The solution lies in another direction. We think of the salvation of the individual in the lire to corne, and find it hard that so fine a young fellov should be barred out of heaven because he was rich. Jesus was thinking of the righteous society on earth which he was initiating and of the young man's fitness for that. Suppose the young man had kept his property and had thus joined the discipleship. How would that have affected the spirit of the group? Would hot the others have felt jealously that he was in a class by himself? If Jesus had shown him favor, would not even the Master's motives have been suspected? If he had replenished the common purse from his private wealth, it would have given them all a more opulent living; it would have attracted selfish men and would have paralyzed the influence of Jesus on the poor. Thoe the crowds would have been at his heels, not merely for healing, but for the loaves and fishes- with dessert added. Judas would have been deeply pleased with such a reënforcement of the apostolate, but Jesus would have gone through the saine sorrow which came upon Francis of Assisi when property was forced upon his Order and its early spirit was corrupted. It is all very well to say that rich and poor are alike in Christ, but in fact only exceptional characters, like Jesus himself, can sit at a rich man's table and be indifferent to the fact that he is rich. Others can forget it for a while under the pressure of a great common danger or sorrow or joy, but in general the sense of equality will prevail only where substantial equality exists. The presence of the ch young man would have been ruinous to the spirit of the discipleship and would have put a debased interpretation on the hope of the "kingdom. Jesus did not ask him to hand over his property for the comnmon purse, as the Church in later timnes did constantly, but simnply to turn it back to social usefulness and corne down to the commnon level. The meeting of Jesus and the rich young man has often been painted, but always as a private affair between the man and Jesus. At the St. Louis Exposition there was a painting representing Jesus sitting in a barnlike building with a group of plain people about himn, women, old men, and the disciples. Before himn stands the young man richly dressed, a bird of very different feather. Jesus by his gesture is evidently drawing in the listening group. It was nota l'natter between the man and God, but between the man and God and the people. The theological interpretations of the passage, like the artistic, have failed to take account of this third factor in the moral situation. If the "kingdom of God is the true humnan society, it is a fellowship of justice, equality, and love. But it is hard to get riches with justice, to keep themn with equality, and to spend themn with love. The -kingdom of God means normal and wholesome human relations, and it is exceedingly hard for a rich man tobe in normal human relations to others, as many a man has discovered who has honestly tried. It can be done only by an act of renunciation in SOl'ne form. It gives a touch of cheerful enjoyl.nent to exegetica! studies to watch the athletic exercises of interpreters when they confront these sayings of Jesus about wealth. They find it almost as hard to get around the needle's eye as the camel would find it to get through. The resources of philology have been ransacked to turn the "camel" into an anchorrope, and Oriental antiquarian lofe bas been summoned to prove that the "needle's «ye" was a little iear-gate of the Oriental bouse through which the camel, by judiciously going down on its -1.mees, could work its way. There is a manifest solicitude to help the rich man through. There bas not been a like fraternal anxiety for the Pharisee; he is allowed to swallow his camel whole. 1 In the case of the parable of the unjust steward 2 there are something like thirty-six different interpretations on record. They differ so widely in their allegorical explanations that we are leff in doubt if the lord of the steward is God or the devil. Yet the parable seems simple if one is not afraid of breaking crockery by handling it as Jesus did. A rich man had farmed out his lands to various tenants on shares. A steward managed the whole and collected the ients. His toaster became suspicious of him and gave him notice of dismissal. It would take effect as soon as his accounts were ruade up. The steward confronted a painful situation. He looked at his white hands and concluded that manual labor was hot in his line. His social pride would hot permit him to beg. So he concluded, as others bave done, to "graft." He used the brief terre of authority still leff him to get on the right side of the tenant farmers by reducing on paper the amount of their harvests and consequently of the shares due to the proprietor. He could hope to enjoy their comfortable hospitality for some rime in returll for the substantial present he ruade them out of his master's pocket. t Matthew 23. 24.  Luke if.

In fact they would have to "stand in" with their confederate to keep him silent. When his rnaster learned of it, he could hot help admiring the cleverness of the rascal, even though it was at his expense. Jesus too admired the shrewdness and foresight which the men of the present social order exhibit within their plane of life. If only the children of light would be as wise in theirs t. His application is that the men who hold the dishonest money of the present era will do well to use the brief term of power left to them before the Messianic era begins. Let them do kindness to the children of the kingdom, and they may hope by their gratitude to get some sort of borrowed shelter when the situation is reversed and the pious poor are on top. t The story shows a very keen insight into the contemporary methods of grafting and into the state of Inind of the grafter. No one could have told the story who had not thought incisively about social conditions. Interpreters have found it necessary to defend Jesus because he holds up an immoral transaction for admiration and imitation. Probably Jesus never imagined that a teacher of his well- -known bent of mind would be supposed to approve of financial trickery. It is precisely because he was so completely outside of and above this whole realm of dealing that he could play with the material as he did, just as a confirmed socialist might use the watering of stock or the "promotion" of a mining company as an illustration of the beauties of socialism. It is hard to imagine Jesus without a smile of sovereign humor in advising these great rnen to get a plank ready for the coming deluge. t The parable stops with v. 9- Vhat follows seems to consist of kindred sayings of Jesus which the editor has grouped here.

The parable of the steward has often been so allegorized and spiritualized that the application to the rich has almost evaporated. His contemporary hearers saw the point. "The Pharisees, who were loyers of money, heard ail these things and they scoffed at him." The Greek verb means literally: "they turned up their nose at him."' Jesus replied to their scoff by telling the story of Dives and Lazarus.  It was not intended to give information about the future life. Its sting is in the reference to the rive brothers of Dives, who were living as he had lived and were in imminent peril of faring as he fared. They were the men who refused to do what the parable of the steward advised them to do. There is a notable difference between our gospels in regard to the amount of teahing on wealth which they report, and in regard to the sharpness of edge which it bears. The Gospel of John is at one extreme; we should hardly know that Jesus had any interest in questions of property if we had only the fourth gospel. There the centre of his teaching is not the kingdom of God, but the eternal life; his interests are religious and theological. The divine figure of the Son of God moves through the doubts and discussions of men like the silver moon sailing serene through the clouds. Luke is at the other extreme. He alone reports the parables of the rich fool, the unjust steward, and Dives and Lazarus. He also gives a sh.arper social turn to sayings reported by the other gospels. For instance, in the beatitudes of Matthew, Jesus blesses the poor in spirit, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, the meek and the pure in heart. In Luke he cheers the socially poor, the physically hungry, and puts t Luke 16. I4.  Luke i6. "rg-3z.

his mneaning beyond question by following up his blessings on the poor with corresponding woes to the rich, the satiated, and the frivolous.  Many critics doubt that Jesus taught as Luke reports him. They think that Luke drew this class of material from a Jewish-Christian source which was tainted with Ebionitic tendencies. I fail to be convinced by their arguments. The other evangelists report so l.nuch of a similar nature that the sections reported by Luke alone seem quite in keeping with the l.nind of Jesus. The material in question seel.ns to bear the literary and artistic coinage of Christ's intellect as much as any other material in the gospels. The "Ebionitic sections" run all through the narrative of Luke, so that they were not drawn fromn Sol'ne brief document covering a smnall portion of Christ's life. The critical suspicions seem to rest on a moral dislike for the radical attitude toward wealth taken by Jesus according to Luke, rather than on sound critical principles. But if it is a question of moral insight, we mnay fairly doubt who saw more truly, Jesus or the mnodern mniddle-class critics. An ascetic distrust of property and the property instinct very eafly affected the Christian Church after its transition to the Greek world, and it is important to be on the watch against any influence of this alien tendency on those who reported the sayings of Christ. But the radical teachings of Jesus are hot ascetic, but revolutionary, and that distinction is fundal.nental. What is called Ebionitic is sil.nply the strong democratic and social feeling which pervaded later Judaismn. The probability is rather that the later reporters softened this social radicalism and spiritualized his thought, than that  Compare Matthew 5- i-i2 with Iuke 6. o-6. G some Ebionitic followers of Jesus imported their social un. test into his spiritual teaching. In any case, Luke put his indorsement on this conception of Christ's thought. He was the only writer in the New Testament, so far as we know, who was of Greek descent and character. He had a singular affmity for all that was humane, generous, heroic, and humanly stirring and touching, and he tells his stories with a distinct artistic note. Men like Stephen, Barnabas, and Paul were his heroes. To him alone we owe the parable of the good Samaritan, of the prodigal son, of the Pharisee and publican, and the story of the great sinncr and the penitent thief. The socialist among the evangelists was also the one who has given us the richest expressions of the free grace of God to sinful men, without which our evangel would be immeasurably poorer. If he was tainted with Ebionitic and Jewish spirit in reporting the teachings on wealth, how did he escape being tainted with the legal and narrow spirit of Jewish Christianity which must have saturated his supposed Ebionitic sources?

As with the Old Testament prophets, the fundamental sympathies of Jesus were with the poor and oppressed. In the glad opening days of his preaching in Galilee, when he wanted to unfold his programme, he turned to the passage of Isaiah • where the prophet proclaimed good tidings to the poor, release to the captives, liberty to the bruised, and the acceptable year of the Lord for all. Now, said Jesus, that is to be fulfilled, t To John in prison he offered as proof that the Messiah had really corne, that the helpless were receiving help, and the poor were listening to glad news3 The Church t Luke 4. 16-22.  1Vatthew Ix. 2- 5.

bas used the miracles of 'esus for theological purposes as evidences of his divine mission. According to the Synoptic gospels, Jesus himself flatly refused to furnish them for such a purpose to the contemporary theologians. I His healing power was for social help, for the alleviation of human surfering. It was at the service of any wretched leper, but not of the doubting scribes. To get the setting of his life we must remember the vast poverty and misery of Oriental countries. It threatened to ingulf him entirely and to turn him into a travelling Inedical dispensary. It is often possible nowadays to detect the social studles and sympathies of a public speaker by an unpurposed phrase or allusion which shows where his mind has been dwelling. This is constantly true of Jesus. If he had hot known how much a strayed sheep or a lost coin meant to the poor, he would hot bave told the anecdotes about their joy in recovering them. 2 If he had hot appreciated the heroic generosity of the poor, he would not bave breathed more quickly when he saw the widow dropping her two mites in the temple treasury. 3 He "l.:new how large a share the lawyers get in settling an estate and how little is left for the widow.  He knew how bitterly hard it is for the poor to set the judicial machinery of organized society in motion in their fayot; hence he used the illustration of the widow and the judge3 He knew the golden rule of "society": dine those by whom you want to be dined. Those who most need a dinner are never asked to bave a dinner. He suggested to his hosts a reversal of this policy,  and he loved to think of the Messianic salvation as an actual reversal on a grand scale, in which th¢ regular guests would be lcft out in the cold, while the halt and blind were gathered from the highways and hedges to enjoy the fat things. 1 No man would have laid on the colors in the opening description of Dives at his feasting and Lazarus among the dogs as Jesus did, 2 who had hot felt vividly the gulf that separates the social classes. If that parable came from the lips of Jesus, that is enough to mark his social spirit. Ex ungue leonem. Jesus proceeded from the common people. He had worked as a carpenter for years, and there was nothing in his thinking to neutralize the sense of class soiidarity which grows up under such circumstances. The common people heard him gladly  because he said what was in their hearts. His triumphal entry into Jerusalem was a poor man's procession; the coats from their backs were his tapestry, their throats his brass band, and a donkey was his steed. During the last days in Jerusalem he was constantly walking into the lion's cage and brushing the sleeve of death. It vas the fear of the people which protected him while he bearded the powers that be. His midnight arrest, his hasty trial, the anxious efforts to work on the feelings of the crowd against him, were all a tribute to his standing with the common people. Dr. W. M. Thomson, in his "Land and the Book," 4 beautifully says: "With uncontrolled power to possess all, he owned nothing. He had no place to be born in but another man's stable, no closet to pray in but the wilderness, no place to die but on the cross of an enemy, and no grave but one lent by a friend." That, perhaps, overstates his  Luke 14. 15-24; Matthew 22. 1-14. 3 Mark 12. 37- * Luke x6. 19-2L "- p. 407.

poverty. But it is fair to say that by birth and training, by moral insight and conviction, by his sympathy for those who were down, and by his success in winning them to his side, Jesus was a man of the common people, and he never deserted their cause as so many others have done. Whenever the people have caught a glimpse of him as he really was, their hearts have hailed Jesus of Nazareth as one of them.

There was a revolutionary consciousness in Jesus; not, of course, in the common use o[ the word "revolutionary," which connects it with violence and bloodshed. But Jesus knew that he had corne to kindle a tire on earth. Much as he loved peace, he knew that the actual result of his work would be hot peace but the sword. His mother in her song had recognized in ber own experience the settled custom of God to "put down the proud and exalt them of low degree," to "fill the hungry with good things and to send the rich empty away."  King Robert of Sicily recognized the revolutionary ring in those phrases, and thought it well that the Magnificat was sung only in Latin. The son of Mary expected a great reversal of values. The first would be last and the last would be first. " He saw that what was exalted among n-mn was an abomination before God,  and therefore these exalted things had no glamour for his eye. This revolutionary note runs even through the beatitudes where we should least expect it. The point of them is that henceforth those were to be blessed whom the world had not blessed, for the -kingdom of God would reverse their relative standing. Now the poor and the hungry and sad were to be satisfied and comforted; the meek who had been shouldered aside by the ruthless would I Luke i. 52-53.  Mark IO. 31.  Luke 16. 15.

The re lution, consci ness ot Jesus.

get their chance to inherit the earth, and conflict and persecution would be inevitable in the process. 1 We are apt to forget that his attack on the religious leaders and authorities of his day was of revolutionary boldness and thoroughness. He caLled the ecclesiastical leaders hypocrites, blind leaders who fumbled in their casuistry, and everywhere missed the decisive facts in teaching right and wrong. Their piety was no piety; their lav was inadequate; they harmed the men whom they wanted to convert. 2 Even the public.ans and harlots had a truer piety than theirs, a If we remember that religion was still the foundation of the Jewish State, and that the religious authorities were the pillars of existing society, much as in mediœeval Catholic Europe, we shall realize how revolutionary were his invectives. It was like Luther anathematizing the Catholic hierarchy. His mind was similarly liberated from spiritual subjection to the existing civil powers. He called Herod, his own liege sovereign, "that fox." 4 When the mother of James and John tried to steal a match on the others and secure for ber sons a pledge of the highest places in the Messianic kingdom, 5 Jesus felt that this was a backsliding into the scrambling methods of the present social order, in which each tries to make the others serve him, and he is greatest who can compel service from most. In the new social order, which was expressed in his own life, each must seek to give the maximum of service, and he would be greatest who would serve utterly. In that connection he sketched with a few strokes the pseudo-greatness of the present aristocracy: "Ye know that they which are supposed to rule over the nations lord it over them, and their great ones tyrannize over them. Thus shall it hot be among you." 1 The monarchies and aristocracies bave always lived on the fiction that they exist for the good of the people, and yet it is an appalling fact how few kings have loved their people and have lived to serve. Usually the great ones bave regarded the people as their oyster. In a similar saying reported by Luke, Jesus wittily adds that these selfish exploiters of the people graciously allow themselves to be called "Benefactors." 2 His eyes were open to the unintentional irony of the titles in which the "majesties," "excellencies," and "holinesses" of the world bave always decked themselves. Every time the inbred instinct to seek precedence cropped up among his disciples he sternly suppressed it. They must hot allow themselves to be called Rabbi or Father or Master, "for all ye are brothers." 3 Christ's idem of society involved the abolition of rank and the extinction of those badges of rank in which former inequality was incrusted. The only title to greatness was to be distinguished service at cost to self. 4 All this shows the keenest insight into the masked selfishness of those who hold power, and involves a revolutionary consciousness, emancipated from reverence for things as they are. The text, "Give to Coesar what is Coesar's,"  seems to mark off a delta|te sphere of power for the emperor, co6rdinate with God's sphere. It implies passive obedience t The English translation, "exercise authorlty over them," is far too weak to do justice to the preposition in «zT«ov«Mçov«tv. ,Veizsaecker translates it vergewaltigen; the Twentieth Century New Testament, "oppress. ' It cal-ries the meaning both of injustice and coercion. * Luke 22. 25. 4 Matthew 2o. 26-28. s Matthew 2 3. I-i2. § Matthew 22. X—22o to constituted authority and above all guarantees Caesar's right to levy taxes. Consequently it has been very dear to all who were anxious to secure the sanctions of religion for the existing political order. During the Middle Ages that text was one of the spiritual pillars that supported the Holy Roman Empire. t But in fact we rnisl"ead it if we take it as a solemn decision, fixing two coSrdinate spheres of life, the religious and the political. His opponents were trying to corner Jesus. If he said "pay the Roman tax," he disgusted the people. If he said "do not pay," Rorne would seize hirn, for its patience was short when its taxes were touched. Jesus wittily cut the Gordian knot by calling for one of the coins. It bore the hated Roman face and starnp on it— clear evidence whence it issued and to whorn it belonged. If they filled their pockets with Ceesar's rnoney, let thern pay Coesar's tax. The significant fact to us is that Jesus spoke frorn an inward plane which rose superior to the entire question. It was a vital question for Jewish religion; it did not even touch the religion of Jesus. Moreover, it was not purely a religious question with them; rnatters that concern rnoney sornehow never are purely religious. In paying tribute to Coesar, they seemed to deny the sovereimty of Jehovah, Israel's only king; that was, indeed, one point for grief. But another point was that they had to pay, pay, pay; and rnoney is such a dear thing! Jesus felt none of their fond reverence for cash. Hence he could say, Give to Coesar the stuff that belongs to hirn, and give to God what he clairns. We have another incident in which his inward attitude to taxation cornes out? The Jews annually paid a poll-tax of t See Bryce, "Holy Roman Empire," i 12-113- 2 Matthew 17. 24-7- half a shekel for the support of the temple worship, which suflîced to maintain it in splendor. ïhe collector met Peter and asked if his toaster did not intend to pay. Peter, probably knowing his custolll hitherto, said, "Certainly." When he came into the house, Jesus, who seems to have overheard the conversation, asked him from whom the kings of the earth usually exacted taxes, from their subjects or their sons. Peter rightly judged that the subjects usually did the paying, and the members of the royal family were exempt. "Then," said Jesus, "as we are sons of God and princes of the bloodroyal, we are exempt from God's temple-tax. But lest we give offence, go catch a fish and pay the tax." We ail "know by experience that the expression of the face and eye are often quite essential for understanding the spirit of a conversation. We must think of Jesus with a stalle on his lips during this conversation with his friend Peter. Yet something of his most fundamental attitude to existing institutions found expression in this gentle raillery. He was inwardly free. He paid because he wanted to, and hot because he had to. Camille Desmoulins, one of the spiritual leaders of the French Revolution, called Jesus"le bon sansculotte." Emile de Laveleye, the eminent Belgian economist, who had the deepest reverence for Christianity as a social force, said, "If Christianity were taught and understood conformably to the spirit of its Founder, the existing social organism could hOt last a day." 1 James Russell Lowell sMd, "There is dynamite enough in the New Testament, if illegitimately applied, to blow all out existing institutions to atoms." 2 These men bave hot seen amiss. Jesus was hot a child of 1,, Primitive Property," xxxi.  In iris essay on " The Progress of the World. ' this world. He did hot revere the men it called great; he did not accept its customs and social usages as final; his moral conceptions did not mn along the grooves marked out by ît. He nourished within his soul the ideal of a common life so radically different from the present that it involved a reversal of values, a revolutionary displacement of existing relations. This ideal was not merely a beautiful dream to solace his soul. He lived it out in his own daily life. He urged others to live that way. He held that it was the only true life, and that the ordinary way was misery and folly. He dared to believe that it would triumph. When he saw that the people were turning from him, and that his nation had chosen the evil way and was drifting toward the rocks that would destroy it, unutterable sadness filled his soul, but he never abandoned his faith in the final triumph of that kingdom of God for which he had lived. For the present, the cross; but beyond the cross, the kingdom of God. I he was not to achieve it now, he would return and do it then. That was the faith of Jesus. Have his followers shared it? Ve shall see later what changes and limitations the original purpose and spirit of Christianity suffered in the course of history. But the Church has never been able to get entirely away from the revolutionary spirit of Jesus. It is an essential doctrine of Christianity that the world is fundamentally good and practically bad, for it was made by God, but is now controlled by sin. If a man wants to be a Christian, he must stand over against things as they are and condemn them in the name of that higher conception of life which Jesus revealed. If a man is satisfied with things as they are, he belongs to the other side. For many centuries the Church felt so deeply that the Christian conce.ption of life and the actual social life are incompatible, that any one who wanted to live the genuine Christian lire, had to leave the world and lire in a monastic community. Protestantism has abandoned the monastic life and settled down to lire in the world. If that implies that it accepts the present condition as good and final, it means a silencing of its Christian protest and its surrender to "the wofld." There is another alternative. Ascetic Christianity called the world evil and left it. Humanity is waiting for a revolutionary Christianity which will call the world evil and change it. We do not want "to blow all out existing institutions to atoms," but we do want to remould every one of them. A tank of gasolene can blow a car sky-high in a single explosion, or push it to the top of a hill in a perpetual succession of little explosions. We need a combination beween the faith of Jesus in the need and the possibility of the kingdom of God, and the modem comprehension of the organic development of human society. We saw at the outset of out discussion that Jesus was not a mere social reformer. Religion was the heart of his lire, and all that he said on social relations was said from the religious point of view. He has been called the first socialist. He was more; he was the first rem man, the inaugurator of a new humanity. But as such he bore within him the germs of a new social and political order. He was too great to be the Saviour of a fractional part of human lire. His redemption extends to all human needs and powers and relations. Theologians have felt no hesitation in founding a system of speculative thought on the teachings of Jesus, and yet Jesus was never an inhabitant of the realm of speculative thought. He bas been ruade the founder and organizer of a great ecclesiastical machine, which derives authority for its offices and institutions from him, and yet "hardly any problem of exegesis is more difflcult than to discover in the gospels an administrative or organizing or ecclesiastical Christ."  There is at least as much justification in invoking his naine to-day as the champion of a great movement for a more righteous social life. He was neither a theologian, nor an ecclesiastic, nor a socialist. But if we were forced to classify him either with the great theologians who elaborated the fine distinctions of scholasticism; or with the mighty popes and princes of the Church who built up their power in his naine; or with the men who are giving their heart and life to the propaganda of a new social system- where should we place him? 1 Peabody, "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," 8 9.