the earth, and cast it into a great wine-press of the wrath of God. And the wine-press was trodden, and blood came out of the wine-press." "And another angel cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. Her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities. Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works; in the cup which she hath filled, fill to her double. How much she hath glorified herself and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death and mourning and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire; for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her. And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her and lament her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning, standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour is thy judgment come. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off and cried, when they saw the smoke of her burning."

At this point the scene shifts. John beholds coming into existence a new social order. Rome and all her works are thought of by him as having come ingloriously to an end. In place of that organization of society, whereby a few saddled themselves on the backs of the many, dawns a new age, the long sought commonwealth

of workers. And all the sons of the morning exult together. It is as the voice of many waters. Also there are harpers harping with their harps. And this new age shall not be for kings and privileged ones in purple. It shall be for the people: "I, John, saw the holy city coming down from God out of heaven. And I heard a great voice saying, The tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away." "And he saith unto me, Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book; for the time is at hand. He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still. I come quickly."

CHAPTER XIV

A ROMAN CITIZEN

THE question presents itself, Why did not the deliverance mentioned by John come? "The things which must shortly be done," is the way he put it. Then why were they not done? "Behold, I come quickly." But the one mentioned did not "come quickly." "The time is at hand," said John. Then why did it not come to birth?

There has been a slip-up somewhere. The full-fed stream of democracy which had been setting in like a flood of mighty waters overflowing, fertilizing the earth with its richness, came after a while to a pause. A time arrived when its waters ceased to rise, then began slowly to recede, and before long the parched plain of human society, which had hailed the bursting forth of the spring with such unmistakable gladness, saw the stream dwindle into a rivulet, and finally disappear. Evidently something has happened.

We are not long in discovering what that something is. Rome the annexer has added one more to her list of annexations she has annexed christianity. It is impossible in passing not to pay a tribute of admiration to her sagacity in the affair, Perceiving herself unable to kill this new Cult of The Carpenter, she kidnaps it. That the Roman Empire should have appropriated

to her own ends the Jesus she had crucified is a brazenness probably without parallel. Rome attributed to herself the ferocity of the wolf. We shall now have

to credit her also with the wisdom of the serpent. The children of this world are in very deed wiser in their generation than the children of light.

The annexing process was started by a Roman citizen named Saul. Formerly a Jew, he deserted his nationality and with it his former name, and called himself thereafter Paul. Paul was undeniably sincere. He believed that in reinterpreting the christian faith so as to make it acceptable to the Romans he was doing that faith a service. His make-up was imperial rather than democratic. Both by birth and training he was unfitted to enter into the working-class consciousness of Galileans. He was in culture a Hellenist, in religion a Pharisee, in citizenship a Roman. From the first strain, Hellenism, he received a bias in the direction of philosophy rather than economics; from the second, his Pharisaism, he received a bias toward aloofness, otherworldliness; and from the third, his Romanism, he received a bias toward political acquiescence and the preservation of the status quo. The intensity with which he first along persecuted the Jesus cult was evidence of this mental make-up. In those Galileans Paul saw a contempt of the learned and cultured class, and thereupon the Hellenist in him flamed up; he saw in them a disregard of churchly morals, and the Pharisee in him flamed up; he saw in them further a revolutionary spirit, and the Roman citizen in him flamed up. So that during this period he had been very zealous in his opposition to "The Way." Then he

experienced conversion. But his conversion did not change these mental forms into which he had been cast, and in which his nature had been hardening through five and twenty years. Rather he carried his mental furniture over into the new allegiance. When he became a christian it was a Hellenistic, Pharisaic, and essentially Romanized type of christian, and very different from the Galilee brand.

And the proof of this is that the Galilean company, after they found out the real spirit that was in this "convert, refused to recognize him. On the contrary they quarreled with him bitterly. The fight is narrated in The Acts. References to it are also found in Paul's writings, in his complaints as to the way the original Galilean band are treating him. Scholars, finding a natural affinity with the Pauline type of mind, take Paul's side and explain the controversy as one in which Paul stood for christianity's release from the ceremonial law of judaism. But the Galileans were notorious for their disregard and irreverence of the Jewish ceremonials, and in the narrative of the quarrel in The Acts, Peter and his followers readily waive this point. No. The opposition between the two parties was deep-lying. It was more than a difference of view as to the importance or nonimportance of Jewish ceremonial. It was an opposition of spirit. It was the fundamental antinomy: Jewish democratism in Peter and his fellow Galileans, as opposed to Roman imperialism in Paul.

For a long time preceding his conversion two men had been contending in Paul - a Roman and a Jew. The feud between them had been violent. It had torn his