constantly is pernicious, but to seem to have them is useful." In Malmesbury's chronicle, we find that the Machiavellian counsels were operative. In his description of Edgar, who signed himself, "King by the bountiful grace of God," we read: "The rigour of Edgar's justice was equal to the sanctity of his manners, so that he permitted no person, be his dignity what it might, to elude the laws with impunity. In his time there was no private thief, no public freebooter, unless such as chose to risk the loss of life for their attacks upon the property of others." By which was meant that the common people must not fish in the streams, or poach on the game preserves of the aristocracy, not even kill the game that destroyed their crops. Those game preserves had formerly been public land, the "commons," whereon the peasants had grazed their geese and the family cow. But the lords fenced in the commons as their private possession. And now, let a peasant be caught hunting there or fishing in the once public streams, and he was visited forthwith by "the rigour of Edgar's justice." Let it be indicated what that "rigour" for impious "attacks upon the property of others," was, remembering meanwhile that it could be for the offence of stealing a sheep for his starving family: The peasant found guilty was put to death, in order to warn his fellows of the heinousness of the crime. His eyes were put out, his ears torn off, his nostrils slit, and his hands and feet cut off; thereupon his scalp was torn from his head, and the peasant was left in this condition to be gnawed to death by the birds and beasts of prey. Through it all Edgar We are a preserved "the sanctity of his manners." bit inclined to side with the peasants in their piteous plaint: The law makes that man a felon, Who steals a common from the goose. Our indictment therefore stands. The Roman Empire both before it took to itself the prefix "Holy" and afterward, was the same an empire of human merchandise. Resting on an economic wrong, it felt its foundations rocking perilously beneath it. To preserve the unstable equilibrium and to allay its palpitations, the empire through its first thousand years kept the toiling masses intimidated by means of soldiery. Through its second thousand years it kept those toilers intimidated by means of "christianity." We have been taught to regard this second period as "the age of faith." But the pious phrase does not stand up beneath the inquisitorial gaze of to-day. Historical science in an age of democracy has a way of peering under the surface; and instead of an "age of faith," it sees the "Holy" Roman Empire as an age of exploitation industrial slavery enforced by a ghostly terrorism. History is past economics; economics is present history. The Roman Empire, in its "Holy" as in its non-Holy period, was motived by one motive: the organized selfinterest of the few perpetuating itself at the expense of the unorganized self-interest of the many. The conclusion is irresistible: much of the history of theology shows it to have been a halter-weight on progress humanity has got forward with that millstone dragging at the bit. "The church," says Macaulay, "was the servile handmaid of monarchy, and the steady enemy of public liberty." "So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun; and behold, the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter." CHAPTER XVII DEMOCRACY'S ULTIMATUM LIKE individuals, institutions also upon crying out "remember not against me the sins of my youth," have a right to a new start. The church to-day is seeking to put away the badness and the sadness of so much of her past, and to get right once more with the working class. For that at present she sickens with a real sickness, is acknowledged by none more candidly than herself. "What must I do to be saved?" is her cry. A mood of self-diagnosis is upon her. One set of her physicians propose exercise - the patient is not active enough. She has the machinery that is needful; all that is required is to run it at higher speed. A programme of more determined evangelism is proposed. The large and increasing multitude of the world's workers are not coming into the church; therefore she must go out and compel them to come in. "We must draw them into the gospel net." But the efforts of this school, though sincere, lack convincing power. The attempt has smacked of the artificial, the machinemade. Says one of the church leaders, himself a member of the revivalist wing and an ardent sympathizer: "The more recent type of evangelism retains few, if any, features of this older school, while it has certain unmistak able marks of its own. It is attended with extensive organization, elaborate preparation, expensive outlay, studied notoriety, display of statistics, newspaper advertising and systematic puffing, spectacular sensationalism, dramatic novelties." From which it is evident that emotional stampeding of the multitudes is not meeting with the success which stamps it as an elemental movement. There is a feel that the work of the christian today is to be something other than driving a gospel wagon. Another set of physicians prescribe the institutional church, and departments of civic and social extension. These are being tried. But here also without signal success. The institutional church provides wholesome recreation for the young, and thereby is doing good. But it is proving powerless to unlock the interior chambers of the soul, where alone are the springs of power. As to ecclesiastically supervised civic and social bureaus, there is a something of amateurishness about them, and the suspicion of an ulterior motive. A "Department of Church and Labour" has to the working class a squint of evangelism by indirection. They see in these innovations the church still "fishing for men," but with the bait concealed now on a snell hook the artifice of an angler grown skilled by failure. So that the chasm between the church and industrialism is wide, and daily growing wider. On the one side we behold democracy sweeping forward with an elemental sweep, as though the stars in their courses were fighting for her a sweep that is making no account of hemispheres or oceans; so that, were one to take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of |