represents Christ as coming back to earth after eighteen hundred years, and all the grandees as rendering Him elaborate homage. Nor do they omit to direct His attention to His own image set up in the places of highest honor. But still, according to our dynamic sociologist:—

To-day no one denies that the foundations are alive and that they heave and sigh. In our age one need not be of the order of Christ to have ears to hear the bitter groans. Everybody hears them, if one may judge from the universal reports of the daily papers. Indeed, how to suppress the groans or to prevent them from becoming more articulate and coherent is the most vexing problem of the government of the most civilized state in the world. At least Prince von Bülow so represents the case in his book entitled Imperial Germany. And the party leaders of the United States have all been alert for two decades to discover how to render impossible an upheaval of the living foundations of America. There is, as I say, no denying the fact that the foundations are alive, and that they not only groan bitterly, but—what is more serious—heave threateningly. Whether any one person, however, is on the side of the living foundations, as according to Lowell Jesus Christ was, or on the side of the thrones and altars, as his conventional worshippers are depicted to be by Lowell and many another American writer since, depends upon what the special person's innate taste is. The thrones and altars have become more and more magnificent in beauty, costliness, and splendor, with the progress of civilization; but not so the mob, the rabble, the "underworld," whose stirrings have rent the walls. Christ's taste, it would seem, was not primarily aesthetic. But then not every one is a son of Mary, and not every carpenter's son sides with the class to which his father belonged.

VII. CIVILIZATION CONDEMNED BY CHRIST AND ALL SONS OF MAN

I said that after my biological analogy I should cite the judgments of some great sages who saw in civilization an enemy of man. Of these I have just been mentioning the greatest. The Founder of Christianity set His Will dead against the established order of society, rebuking the upholders of thrones and altars, and becoming the champion of the outcasts. The kingdom, He announced, was not to be of this our world of moneylenders. No wonder the rulers of His day gave Him short quarter, so that after three years of agitation this speaker of rousing parables to the multitude, who had no bank account, was silenced forever. Likewise, it was a foregone conclusion that every disciple of Christ whose spirit was to be set aflame by His—like St. Francis, and Savonarola, Wycliffe, Luther (at the first), and John Wesley—should turn in pity to the living foundations and in horror of spirit from the entombing thrones.

But the protest against the sacrifice of man to mammonized society has been no monopoly of Christ and those spiritually descended from Him. The ancient Hebrew prophets taught equally a kingdom that was to be diametrically the opposite in principle from that which prevailed in the Jewish State or in Babylon, and later in Macedon or Rome. It should be noted that the prophets and Christ accompanied their censure of the formative principle, upon which nations and traders had built up their dealings with one another, with a proposed substitute. But if we go back to Gautama and the India of his time, we find that the Buddha's protest against civilization was still more extreme; for he did not wait to submit a new principle before condemning the old. Indeed, he felt that self-conscious existence for the individual, as he beheld it everywhere, was a tragic calamity, and altogether unendurable. Preferable would be the extinction utterly of all individualized selfhood. He would isolate the individual and submit him to a discipline, the object of which was escape forever from the wheel of existence. He advocated not mere individualistic anarchy, but the annihilation of individuality as preferable to civilized life. A third of the human race still believe in his discipline, and in the alternative he proposed to the highly developed type of social order which prevailed in his time in India.

Nor do Gautama, the prophets, and Christ stand alone. All the great humanists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although professing no discipleship of earlier teachers, were at one with them in condemning the root-principle of the existing co-ordination of human lives in politics, economics, and education. The cry of Rousseau, "Back to Nature!" and all the watchwords of Voltaire and the encyclopædists, were so many summonses to revolt against the entire order of organized society. The same meaning underlay all the writings of Fourier and Prudhomme, of Owen and the other English communists. It was as if they all said, "Civilization is a disease; let us rid ourselves of it." With the socialists, Marx and Lassalle, and the anarchists, like Stepniak and Kropotkin, the condemnation of society, as it is and always had been, was equally radical and sweeping. Even humanists less violent in their protest, not so negative in their criticism, nor so positive in their offered substitutes, like Carlyle and Emerson, like Shelley and Whitman and Swinburne, like Henry George and Henry Demorest Lloyd, all aim to create in us the judgment that civilization, as it has been from the first, is no friend to the best in any man. No lover of humanity seems ever to have worshipped the god who rules over the things that are established. They all agree with the mediæval theologians that this world has been given over to the Prince of Darkness.

VIII. TWO INSTANCES OF CIVILIZATION

We may come to wonder the less at this adverse judgment when we have considered two instances of the effects which the highest types of civilization have had upon the masses of mankind who were brought under its sway. Take ancient Egypt and ancient Athens. Go back to the building of the pyramids. Although they are among the earliest monuments of civilization, they are yet among the most marvellous illustrations of the mastery of the human mind over matter. Scarcely three had passed of the ten thousand years which have constituted the epoch that superseded barbarism, before these vast tombs, or whatever they are, began to be erected. Lost in admiration as he stands before the Great Pyramid, how can any one but resent the suggestion that the social order, which made it at last possible, was a disease, preying upon the body and spirit of men?

And yet, if one turns from it to examine that organization of human labor and that control of the wills of the masses of Egypt which made it possible, and then again looks up at it, one marks great