This doom, that Christ uttered, came to pass. The judgment is not upon the hollow emptiness of the Roman civilisation alone. It is the doom of every culture and refinement of man that is built upon the oppression of the poor.

It was at this hour, we read, when the poor were all round him, that Jesus rejoiced in spirit. He saw how the worldly-wise and scheming rich men were rejecting with scorn the message of his Father, while the simple village people received it gladly,

"I thank thee," he cried, "O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight. All things are delivered to me by my Father, and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him."

Humanity, in its childlike spirit of sonship, as manifested among these poor people, can understand God and know Him. It can also understand Christ, who shares the same childlike nature. But these sophisticated and selfish rich and worldly people cannot understand God at all. They reject Christ. The deeper truths are a sealed book to them. The inner life and its joys are unknown.

Jesus then turned directly towards those whom he had called 'babes '—the toiling and labouring village people and uttered the words of invitation, the 'com

fortable words' which have touched the human heart

in every age,

"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me: for I am meek and lowly of heart; and ye shall find rest to your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

He says to the tired labourers around him, who were compelled to work day after day in a half-famished. condition,-like their own cattle in the field," I cannot take away altogether this burden of daily drudgery from you, but I can relieve it. I cannot withdraw your neck altogether from the yoke of human sufferings, but I can make that yoke easy and light to bear. Come and learn from me. I am meek and lowly of heart. Seek your true joy, like me, in this inner life. Only in this way can you find rest to your souls."

Christ was not concerned primarily with changes in the outward order. The outward daily yoke had to be borne: it could never be escaped. But its character could be changed. Instead of being a heavy burden, it might become a light and easy task, joyfully fulfilled.

The message of Jesus is the same throughout the whole Gospel-the message of inward renunciation.

The goal is the same throughout the whole Gospelthe lightening of the burden of human sorrow.

The pathway is the same throughout the whole Gospel-the pathway of the inner spirit, the pathway of the transformed inner life.

We seem to have strayed far away from the atmosphere of labour questions,' in the modern sense of the term. Yet, in reality, this is not so. For the underlying motives of human life are always far harder to alter and get right again than the outward acts themselves. It is the inward method which goes deepest.

Christ went directly to the motives. He dealt supremely with them. For this reason, whether we read Christ's stern denunciations of the rich, who live luxurious lives; his hatred of greed and selfishness; his indignation at the religious hypocrisy which destroyed widows' houses and for a pretence made long prayers; his righteous wrath against the money-changers and hucksterers in his Father's house, or whether we read of his tenderness towards the suffering poor; his gentle pity for the sick; his forgiving compassion for the sinner and the prostitute, the outlook is always the same. What he aims at, all the while, is the healing of the body of wounded humanity by a exhaustible inflowing of divine love. His inward method is clear for all time, and none can mistake it. It is only the service of love that can finally prevail. "Who is greater," he said, "he that sitteth at meat or he that serveth? But I am among you as he that serveth."

And again,

"The Son of Man is come not to be ministered to, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many."

Permanent improvement in human conditions of labour is only possible where this inner spirit of pure,

unselfish service is realised and understood. Without this inner spirit, all labour movements are little else than the building up of houses on the sand of the seashore, to be washed away by each incoming tide.

St. Paul had reached the same truth in a different way when he said the words

"Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and have not love, it profiteth nothing."

When we come back to history, in order to test our religious theories by actual events in the world of men and things, it is with an intense relief that we are able to turn away from that imposing and pretentious Roman Empire, with all its superficial splendour, to the little band of Christians gathered together in Solomon's Porch in Jerusalem, who,

"Being of one heart and of one soul, counted nought of what they possessed as their own, but had all things in common."

This was the first attempt made in the name of Jesus to express, in outward form and in concrete ways, a brotherhood of labour' which sprang from the very centre of the inner life. It was purely voluntary and intuitive, a free and willing service. It differs from what is to-day called Communism' in this respect, that it was an act which had its sources within the soul: it was not a system imposed by man from without.

Voluntary, as indeed it was, we can see that the conditions which went to make the perfect fulfilment of the

communal life of saintliness and prayer and love for humanity in God,-these have been founded, age after age, in ever renewed succession. They have, again and again, formed the nucleus of a nobler society. The ideal of the brotherhood of labour has not lost its power, even in our own day. It points still to the future, when a voluntary communal life may become the normal life of society over large areas as the direct outcome of co-operative endeavour.

But a wider world was opening out before the children of the new faith as this period of infancy and inexperience was left behind. The Roman Empire, with which the Christian Church now came into contact, was suffering from the effects of a great and ever deepening demoralisation. The degeneracy of the highly cultivated Greeks, who had become subjects of the Roman Empire, infected their Roman conquerors. Luxury became the curse of the Roman capital, and it spread to all the provinces. This was the disease which every one of the earlier Emperors tried in vain to cure. The evil increased with gigantic strides. Freedmen of the worst class made enormous fortunes, and by bribery and corruption undermined the foundations of the Roman State. The ruinous passion for wealth inflamed the whole patrician aristocracy of Rome. To give one example only, we read how Lollia informed Pliny that her dress had cost her £350,000. The agriculture of Italian country districts, along with that of many of the provinces, was no longer in the hands of sturdy