unjust system has wrought. We are going to see, nay, we are already seeing, to the very foundations of our social and political institutions. Their hidden rottenness is coming to light and calls for cleansing. The pillars of society stand out before men's eyes for exactly what they are. Herod was not seen to be a murderer until he had ruthlessly beheaded John. That proclaimed him a homicide. The church and state had not been seen to be the incarnation of anarchy and murder until they nailed Jesus on a cross. The light which now arises above the horizon is revealing the fact that what we have been accustomed to call business is only stealing made legal, that commerce is only piracy made respectable by law, that respectability is for the most part a thin veneer made necessary to maintain the immoral distinctions of class, that religion is very largely hypocrisy, and statemanship the art of proving the virtue and value of a vicious system.
And now as then to those who have ears to hear there comes the same divine summons to freedom and fraternity. No diviner or more authoritative voice spoke in Palestine nineteen hundred years ago than speaks today in the hopes and faiths and longings of the common people. I cannot better bring the articulate summons of the new era than in the words of two of our American poets—Lowell and Whitman.
