Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/199

Rh programme of the reforms which yet remain to he accomplished. "He shall judge the poor of the people, He shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor. He shall spare the poor and needy, and shall save the souls of the needy. There shall be an handful of corn in the earth upon the top of the mountains" (Psalm lxxii. 4, 13, 16). "And the work of righteousness shall be peace; and the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance for ever" (Isaiah xxxii. 17). "Surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies, and the sons of the stranger shall not drink thy wine, for the which thou hast laboured; but they that have gathered it shall eat it, and praise the Lord; and they that have brought it together shall drink it in the courts of My holiness" (Isaiah lxii. 8, 9). In the New Jerusalem "there shall be no more sorrow nor crying." "They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat; for as the days of a tree are the days of My people, and Mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands" (Isaiah lxv. 21, 22).

The prophet thus raises his voice in favour of the poor, in the name of justice, not of charity and mercy. "The Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of His people and the princes thereof: for ye have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye beat My people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord God of hosts" (Isaiah iii. 14, 15). "Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth" (Isaiah v. 8). In the future society property will be ensured to all, and every one will "sit under his vine and under his fig tree" (Micah iv. 4).

The ideal of the prophets comprehends, then, in the first place, the triumph of justice, which will bring liberty to the oppressed, consolation to the outcast, and the produce of their labours to the workers; and secondly, and chiefly, it will bring the glorification and domination of the elect people—Israel.

The ideal of the Gospel makes less of this second consideration of national grandeur and pre-eminence, and places in the foreground the radical transformation of the social order. The Gospel is the "good tidings of great joy," the Εναγγέλιον, carried to the poor, the approach of the Kingdom of God—that is to say, of the reign of justice. "The last shall be first;" therefore the pretended "natural order" will be reversed!

Who will possess the earth? Not the mightiest, as in the animal creation, and as Darwinian laws decree; not the rich, "for it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God." Lazarus is received into Abraham's bosom, while Dives is cast into the place of torment, "where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth." The first of biological precepts,