But the Bible Christian, the Neo-Protestant, will never submit to a world despotism such as this, when it attempts to interfere with his duty toward his God. His Master when here on earth persistently and consistently refused to have any part whatever in civil or political affairs, declaring, "My kingdom is not of this world." On another occasion he said, "If any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not: . the word that I have spoken, the same will judge him in the last day." On still another occasion he was offered the undisputed rule of all the kingdoms of the world; but he refused it with the most decided emphasis, thus setting an example for his Church to the close of time. But this offer of the kingdoms of the world has seemed much more attractive to the apostate church of all subsequent ages; and it is evident that any church that avails herself of the offer which was spurned by her Master, thereby declares herself to be not the true Church of Christ. A church that unites with the civil power, be it state, national, or world-wide, must be an apostate church; and hence must be intolerant. But to such a power the true Christian will never submit. Like all the moral heroes of the past, he declares, "We ought to obey God rather than men."

VII

But while this world federation is the ultimate goal toward which, consciously or unconsciously, all humanity seems to be moving with steady, glacial flow, a much more immediate issue lies just before us. The radicals among the Socialists, the labor-unionists, the I. W. W.,-in a word, the whole of the proletariat, are raising issues which they consider are the real first steps toward the goal of their ambitions. And these issues also are not confined to America; they, too, constitute an international problem, a world-wide conflict, with the battle already on; and for its suppression no peace societies have yet been organized, no "truce of God" has been proclaimed.

For while the wealth of our modern civilization has been steadily concentrating in the hands of a few, who seem privately to control not only the financial systems but the governments of the world, the Socialists and the leaders of organized labor have been conducting schools for the study of these matters on the street corners of every large city throughout Christendom. Lecture halls have been packed with discontented and desperate men, who have listened night after night and Sunday after Sunday to an evangel based on facts and arguments which seem very real to them, and which stir to the very depths some of the most dynamic motives of the human heart. The mails are burdened with literature of the same character. I am not discussing the right or the wrong of this propaganda, I am trying to face a fact, trying to study in the impartial spirit of science, a condition, a situation, that has already crossed all national and geographical boundary lines, and, not will be, but is a world problem.

And since the pursuit of wealth seems to be regarded as the most important object that can occupy the thought and energies of mankind, why should not these problems of the Socialists be indeed the most important that can occupy the attention of civil governments? So long as a handful of men have wealth and power beyond the dreams of Solomon or Croesus; while the great mass of people in all civilized countries have comparatively only a small portion, and can only by constant struggle stand off the collector and the bailiff, and ten millions in the United States, with a much larger proportion in other lands, live on the very border line of destitution, and often do not know where they are to get the next meal, we must own that the socialistic agitators have a big text from which to preach, and have no trouble in getting an audience.

We may affect to ignore the influence of the soap-box orators; but in an age of the telegraph and the multiple press the whole world ultimately becomes a wide street corner

from which these fiery economic evangelists, the modern Urbans, the Peters, the Bernards, are preaching a new crusade which requires no long, toilsome march; for the Jerusalem of their dreams lies but a few blocks away, in the form of a well-filled warehouse, a skyscraper, or a brownstone mansion. And it seems high time for every man endowed with reason to throw away his prejudices and theories, to face the facts of the actual situation, and to take his stand with the One who has given us a true account of these conditions and their outcome, in those Scriptures which contain history more modern than the latest daily, and which are a safer guide of life than the wisdom of all the wise.

VIII

I do not know how far this plan of a world federation may ever be carried out. One thing I do know: That the race has not within itself elements enough of integration and cohesion to permit any such scheme to succeed, except temporarily and under the hothouse stimulation of some spiritualistic fanaticism or obsession, which may be able to blend for a time those mutually antagonistic elements with which all former schemes of civil government have been distracted and torn. Any scheme for world peace and world unity which is built up in a purely human way, on the basis of the deification of man and of his achievements, is foredoomed to failure and ruin; and it may well turn out that such a scheme of a federated world, renewing again on a universal scale the long-interrupted attempt at Babel, may justly be regarded by heaven, for various reasons, as the climax of apostasy, calling for the final closing of the long reign of sin, the close of probation for the race, and the coming of Him whose right it is to reign.

What spectacle more horrible to contemplate than that of a world which has closed its probation, which has been abandoned to the course of its own choosing by the justice of a long-suffering Jehovah, who has at last ceased to hold in check the fierce elements of lust and passion and fury, and

allows them to rage unleashed and unrestrained? Nations and cities have had their day, have come to the end of their probation, and have gone out into darkness, amid a debacle of blood and ruin. Why not a world? When the doomed nation of the Jews crowded into their beautiful city in their fatuous attempt to withstand the tempest of the Roman legions, they spent every breathing spell in deadly quarrels among themselves; and had the Romans not taken the city, the various factions would have exterminated one another by their own fratricidal strife. When the gay capital of France was at last allowed to experience the simple, natural consequences of the preceding centuries, in banishing the Word of God and abandoning a quick-witted and emotional people to the corrupting influences of a flippant, godless philosophy and the despotism and hypocrisy of an apostate church, the world stood aghast at the spectacle of a whole nation gone mad. Behold then a city, a nation, abandoned to the reaping of the sad harvest of its own sowing. What will it be when the whole world has at last ended its probation, when it is thus entirely abandoned to evil, and when the pent-up forces of demoniac fury bring upon the whole earth a ruin more dreadful than that which came upon Jerusalem or upon Paris?

My soul refuses to dwell on the picture; but I could wish, with the prophet of old, that my head were waters and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the sad end of all the dreams of a world peace and a world federation with which the fond hopes of many generations have been deluded by false prophets and unfaithful watchmen, who have preached peace, peace, when there is no such peace warranted by history, by science, by sociology, or by the Word of God.

As Heine, the remarkable German-Jewish writer, expressed it nearly a century ago, when the great social revolution does come, "the French Revolution will be only an innocent idyl."

CHAPTER XII

Conclusion

"Christian life without Christian doctrine has never yet appeared. Those who claim to show it in Christian lands are simply cuckoos in nests of Christian doctrine which they built not, but whose warm environment makes them what they are.”. - The Stone Lectures, 1896.

I

SCIENCE is accustomed to control-experiments, in which all the accompanying conditions can be arranged beforehand with the two or more subjects which are to be tested, so that differences in results, if any, can be more accurately compared, and the exact cause of these differences definitely determined.

But in many departments of scientific study we cannot control beforehand the work of nature; we can only select as best we may various pieces of work ready-made by nature, of course without any regard to our curiosity as to the causes of things. We cannot take two volcanoes and, by controlling the water supply and the oxygen from the air and from the surrounding oxygen-bearing rocks, determine experimentally whether they are connected with a great molten interior, or originate in comparatively shallow, isolated pockets, so to speak, with their heat supplied by the combustion of carboniferous deposits, as taught by Werner, and as many now teach, or supplied largely by chemical action, as taught by Davy and Gay-Lussac.

In history, also, we have to take things as we find them. Human beings are not like rabbits or guinea pigs that we can place under control-conditions and experimentally test our theories. No one historical example can be sufficiently free from complications satisfactorily to determine just what