uttered his burning message there on the bank of the Jordan he was arrested, imprisoned and beheaded by order of Herod. And who was Herod? Herod was a man who bore the title of king, and that means just one thing, and only one. Herod was the agent—the paid agent—of the ruling class of his time. That is all Herod was. And what he did was applauded by every member of that class. It was exactly what they would have him do.
The truth of the matter is, John the Baptist had not been preaching six months before he discovered a fact which some people now on the eve of the twentieth century do not seem to know. He found out that there is such a thing as a class struggle. It was none of the common people that caused the arrest of John. They loved him. They listened to him. He spoke the language of their hearts. He aroused the highest aspirations of their souls. No, it was another class entirely that put this man out of the way. And of all the men who have lived on this earth whose words have been recorded and preserved, not one has had so much to say about this "class struggle" as this man Jesus, whom the great institution calling itself the Christian Church has the audacity to pretend to worship. There is not one discourse of Jesus on record nor an incident of his life reported in which that fact does not appear. What was the
