Page:The English Peasant.djvu/394

 "It is a lamentable thing that they should finish up in this way with these poor people. But what is to be done? God intends that it may spread a terror in the people. Otherwise, Satan would do worse than the princes do now."

IV.

God intends that it may spread a terror in the people. Here is the secret of the long and doleful history of Christendom, ending after nineteen centuries in its people being almost entirely alienated from that which the Churches teach as the Gospel.

Poor people, it is sometimes said with surprise, believe they will go to heaven simply because they have suffered so much on earth. What is this but faith in the Justice of God?

This obstinate belief in a final reign of Justice, the last consolation of the poor and the oppressed, was the secret of the great uprising we have been considering, and this was why they hailed with such joy the first proclamation of the Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven.

When the outcasts of Jerusalem found that the chief object that Jesus Christ had was to proclaim a reign of Justice, and to establish it on earth; when they saw that with Him the advantage of individuals was only regarded as it helped to establish or illustrate the kingdom of Heaven; when they found that in pursuit of this object He was not afraid to rebuke offenders—however pious, respectable, or highly placed—faith in God and man once more rose in their hearts, and in their unwonted joy they made the streets of Jerusalem resound with the cry: "Blessed is the King that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest!"

Such a view of the Gospel will not, I am conscious, appeal to a society like ours, based on the idea that every individual necessarily seeks his own advantage. What consoles the oppressed people is not the promise of personal profit, even when it takes the form of eternal felicity, but the certainty that Justice will be vindicated.

And because this Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven is not preached in England, Christians have not recognised that the