Page:The English Peasant.djvu/395

 primary object of their calling is that they should at all cost devote themselves to bringing about the reign of Justice on earth.

To do so would doubtless involve the same results it has always done. For injustice is to so great a degree the basis of our society, and the progress of injustice is so rapid, that to make any real stand against it will certainly lead to the charge of stirring up the people, and possibly to a fate similar to His against whom this accusation was first brought.

In the fourteenth century there was no book more popular than "The Vision of Piers Plowman." The Individual Christian, the poor hard-working Man, Human Nature, the Church, are all represented in the character of Piers Plowman, and, by a profoundly Christian thought, Jesus Christ in His suffering and humiliation is so identified with Piers Plowman that the poet cannot distinguish who it is he beholds. In the nineteenth passus he falls into a dream during Mass:—

This is the faith that has ever lain dormant in the heart of the people, the faith that found voice and action in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and again in our own times. If