fathers were worse than our grandfathers, we are worse than our fathers, our children will be worse than we"; and in one of his odes he promises an immortal fame to any one who will restore to Rome her aforetime morality. That The Carpenter should have given a clean bill of health to the indecencies for which Rome and her Cæsars had come to stand, is beyond credence. A little later, and we shall find martyrs of "the Name" dying unspeakable deaths by the thousand for their refusal to "render unto Cæsar" the respect he demanded a most unfortunate misunderstanding on their part, if their Master himself had meant to make capitulation to Rome. Jesus did not spend his lifetime in beating the air. On the contrary he speaks of his liberation movement as being directed against a specific adversary. He likens it to a widow who pleaded with a judge, "avenge me of mine adversary." The judge, importuned, at last consents: "And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them?”

No. This proof-text on which, as on a single peg, the devotees of world-forgetfulness hang their claim that The Carpenter was a pietistic, non-worldly rhapsodist, becomes on examination a most insecure hold for them. On a previous occasion, despite the jocularity of his tone, there are signs that he seriously contemplated withholding any further tribute money to the Roman invader. After a council with his disciples, however, he consented and told Peter to go fishing and raise the tax in that way from the money the fish would bring; but he explained that in consenting to this he was moved by expediency alone: "Lest we give offence." So in the present instance.

The fact that the spies sent out against him hit upon this particular question, "Is it lawful to give tribute unto Cæsar," in order to "take hold of his words, that they might deliver him unto the Governor," is eloquent of the general idea as to what his attitude was toward Cæsars and Cæsarisms. Wherefore we conclude that as it happened to those ancient adversaries of his who "took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk," so also with the quietists in every age since; in their efforts to wrest The Carpenter from his basic hold in the economic, they can not "take hold of his words."

CHAPTER VIII

THE RAPIDS

BUT precautions were of no avail. In the doctrines of this mild-mannered teacher from Galilee the ruling caste detected danger; for the toiling masses had a strange way of awakening to his words as to the calling of trumpets. Instead of the dead and sodden mass of humanity which their eyes had been accustomed to behold - spiritless, sunk in despair - those oligarchs now beheld a coming to life of the lower classes wherever The Carpenter visited a hope beginning to sparkle in their eye, an unwonted vibrancy in their tone, a more upstanding carriage of their person the kingdom of self-respect is come nigh unto them, and they are pressing into it. This was a dangerous state of affairs for the privileged order. The local aristocracy had not only their own position and revenues to conserve, but a responsibility to the Romans in keeping the populace quiet. Therefore, "from that day forth they took counsel together."

With the gathering of opposition, the tone of The Carpenter undergoes a change. His words take on a fierceness which had not been there before. For he has not been permitted to work in Galilee unmolested. The Jerusalem oligarchy sent down spies thither, dogged his footsteps and nagged him into controversy. Therefore he leaves Galilee now, and makes incursions into the

enemy's Judea district. He throws off his aversion to publicity comes out into the open. He meets the challenge of his adversaries. The mellow tones which he had used toward working-class Galileans with their simple and unaffected outlook upon life are no longer heard. Instead there is now hardness, a note of warning, a castigation of the privileged set, an accent of sternness unrelenting as a law of nature. If his earlier teaching had rock of iron underneath it all, there had been deepness of soil and a greenery, a genial clothing for it. Now, however, the granite crops out to the surface, sometimes with not enough verdure to veil its hard nakedness. To those who have the "Lamb of God" idea of The Carpenter, a study of his speeches in this later period of his career would be highly rewarding.

To this Judean stage of his ministry belong his strictures against the ultra-rich. They were "hard sayings" at the time, and if anything they are “harder” still to-day. The Carpenter regarded great individual fortunes in a society where there was equally great destitution as ipso facto proof that a love of material values predominates in the heart of the possessor over a love of human values, and therefore as shutting him out from the kingdom of self-respect. Jesus thought of human society as constituting one family. Anything that binds this family together is good; anything that sunders this family is bad. Vast private fortunes are a distinctly divisive force in this family group. Therefore he set himself against such fortunes; and this not only for the sake of the poor, but for the sake of the rich themselves. For a man's only happiness can come through society

John Ball's teaching, too: "Fellowship is heaven, lack of fellowship is hell." Anything that builds a wall of separation between a man and his fellows, even though it be a wall of gold and silver and precious stones, is distinctly bad for him.

A rich young ruler comes to him. Jesus commands that he reduce his "great possessions" to a sum proportionate to his interior worth, his personal share in the creation of that wealth. Probably nine tenths of the discontent which mars the harmony of life and defeats our social destiny takes its rise in the workings of the law of testation and inheritance. People do not begrudge wealth to a creator of wealth. It is when the creator dies and passes it on to an heir who did no stroke to create it, who knows naught of its meaning, and therefore is incapable of a high directorship of it, that the begrudgment begins. Most great fortunes are annexed rather than created. Remembering this principle, much of the "hardness" of the sayings of The Carpenter in this matter of rich men disappears. "How hardly shall they that are annexers enter into the kingdom of self-respect; for it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for an annexer to enter into the kingdom of selfrespect." No young man of self-respect will accept a place in human society higher than his own personal worth achieves for him. The rich young man in question was the son of his father a member of the hereditary ruling class. He was reaping where he had not sown, and gathering where he had not strawed. Further, much of a rich man's revenue comes from the labour of women and children an able-bodied

person who is