he is made low; because, as the flower of the grass he shall pass away.

For the sun is no sooner risen with a burning heat but it withereth the grass, and the flower thereof falleth, and the grace of the fashion of it perisheth: so also shall the rich man fade away in his ways."--James 1:9-ll.

"Nothing is hid," was the word of Jesus, "that shall not be made manifest, nor anything secret that shall not be known and come to light." Many things have been hidden in that extraordinary amalgam that we call historical Christianity. St. Paul hid in it his peculiar idiosyncratic contempt of marriage and lack of reverence for women, and these elements worked out in the millennial denial of woman's rights and the abnormalities and tragedies of asceticism. St. Paul, again, and the unknown authors of the letter to the Hebrews and the fourth Gospel hid in primitive Christianity the Greek passion for metaphysics, and there emerged that perverse exaltation of dogma and orthodoxy which has, more than any other thing, withered the heart of the Church, smothered its fresh spontaneous life, kindled the infernal fires of heresy-trials and autos-da-fé. But Jesus hid something in historic Christianity, too, something deeper, diviner, mightier than any foreign ingredients added by other hands. Those commingling elements the Christianity of Jesus probably had to take up, test, and eventually reject. The only way, perhaps, in which the real meaning of Christianity could be discovered by men was in contrast with the innumerable and heterogeneous adulterations of it. We come to truth, it has been profoundly said, by the exhaustion of error. Humanity cannot apparently be sure of the right road till it knows all the wrong roads as well. So it would certainly have seemed to be with historic Christianity.

But deepest and most vital of all the elements that have found their way into historic Christianity is what Christ hid there,--the equality of brotherhood. That hidden element, too, must find its way to the light. Early repressed, driven in, well nigh smothered, it has, nevertheless, never been extinguished, for it is the secret force, the most deeply vital essence of Christianity. As Bernard Shaw has said, it is not true that Christianity has been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and has never been tried. But in the profound words of Martineau, "In the history of systems an inexorable logic rids them of their halfness and hesitancies and drives them straight to their appointed goal." Not always by a straight road but by a sure one.

Nothing is more certain than that the human intellect must refuse eventually to acquiesce in that strange, illogical, and inconsistent jumble we call our Christian civilization. Something drives it irresistibly to consistency. The Christianity of Jesus means nothing if it does not mean brotherhood. Brotherhood means nothing if it does not mean a passion for equality. The story is told that when the Duke of Wellington, who, like so many other great soldiers of other times and of our own, was a devout man, was kneeling to receive the Communion in the village Church near his estate, a humble neighbour found himself, to his consternation, kneeling close beside the great Duke. He was rising at once to move away when the Duke put out his hand and detained him, saying, "We are all equal here." It was a fine spirit that the Duke showed for the time and in a country such as England was then. But it holds in it explosives of which probably the Duke did not dream. Equal at the table of their Common Lord! Then equal everywhere! Equality everywhere or equality nowhere! The soul of every man who has seen the divine beauty of equality must forever war against all limitations and impairments of it. Even human logic can not permanently tolerate such a fundamental incompatibility and irrationality as religious equality and social inequality sleeping in the same bed. Religious equality has already worked itself out in political equality. Even in aristocratic England the last vestige of political inequality has disappeared. The accepted formula is now--one man, one vote. It may be a harder problem to work out, but economic equality will be worked out to the same conclusion--one man, one share of all the conditions of human dignity and well being.

The keen satire of Charles Kingsley in Alton Locke will not always be justified.

"Faix, an' ain't we all brothers?" asked Kelly.

"Ay, and no," said Sandy, with an expression which would have been a smile, but for its depths of bitter earnestness; "brethren in Christ, my laddie."

"An' ain't that all over the same?"

"Ask the preachers. Gin they meant brothers, they'd say brothers, be sure; but because they don't mean brothers at a', they say brethren--ye'll mind, brethren--to soun' antiquate, an' professional, an' perfunctory-like, for fear it should be ower real, an' practical, an' startling, an' a' that; and then jist limit it down wi' a 'in Christ,' for fear o' owre wide applications, and a' that. But

For a' that, and a' that,

It's comin' yet, for a' that,

When man an' man, the warld owre,

Shall brothers be, for a' that--

An' na brithren any mair at a'!"

Social inequality between human beings can never be a permanent relation. Ordinarily between normal human beings it is a hateful and demoralizing relation. It is twice cursed. It curses him who is down and him who is up.

It powerfully tends to make the one who is down and knows he is down, subservient, a truckler, a fawner. If a man is wise enough and strong enough to withstand the influence, the probability is that the very effort at resistance, unless he is very wise and very strong, will develop an unlovely and ungracious spirit of defiance, sometimes of hostility. In any case, human nature generally sours under it.

It is, perhaps, even worse in its effects on the one who is up. At the best he becomes condescending, affable, gracious, patronizing--intolerable attitudes every one. At the worst he becomes arrogant and insolent. Always he tends to become suspicious and cynical. He learns to distrust the forced respectfulness and obligingness everywhere shown to himself, and so comes to distrust courtesy and good-will in general.

H. G. Wells in his The Future in America inserts a picture of "one of the most impressive of these very rich Americans." "My friend beheld him, gross and heavy, seated in an easy chair in the centre of his private car, among men who stared and came and went. He clutched a long cigar with a great clumsy hand. He turned on you a queer, coarse, disconcerting bottle nose with a little hard, blue, wary, hostile eye that watched out from the roots of it. He said nothing. He attempted no civility, he looked pride and insults--you ceased to respect yourself.... 'It was Roman,' my friend said. 'There has been nothing like it since the days of that republic. No living king would dare to do it. And these other Americans! These people walked up to him and talked to him--they tried to flatter him and get him to listen to projects. Abjectly. And you knew, he grunted. He didn't talk back. It was beneath him. He just grunted at them!"

Just as clear as the incompatibility of Christianity with social inequality is its incompatibility with