Page:The cry for justice - an anthology of the literature of social protest. - (IA cryforjusticea00sinc).pdf/423

 was a favorite with Nero, and was using that favoritism to amass an enormous fortune. Paul was too highly educated—using the term in its academic sense—to be at one with the unbookish Galileans, and he was personally too much the gainer from Rome's empire of privilege to share the insurrectionary spirit of the Son of Mary

Paul was under the spell of Rome's material greatness. His heart was secretly enticed by her triumphal arches, her literature, her palaces on the Palatine, her baths, porticos of philosophy, gymnasia, schools of rhetoric, her athletic games in the arena. He thought of her history, her jurisprudence, her military might, the starry names in her roll of glory, her sweep of empire from the Thames to the Tigris, and from the Rhine to the deserts of Africa; and when, to this summary, came the pleasant reflection that he was a part of this world corporation, one of the privileged few to share in its profits, it was not hard for him to find reasons to justify his desertion of that poverty-stricken and fanatically democratic race of Israel off there in unimportant Palestine.

A true Roman, Paul preaches to the proletariat the duty of political passivity. To the Carpenter, with his splendid worldliness, the premier qualification for character was self-respect, and the alertness and mastery of environment which go with self-respect. But to Paul the primate virtue is submissiveness—"the powers that be!" He sought to cure the seditiousness of the working class by drawing off their gaze to a crown of righteousness reserved in heaven for them—a gaseous felicity beyond the stars. Israel, holding fast to the enrichment of the present life, had kept its religion from getting off into fog lands, by seeking "a city that hath foundations." But Paul sought to hush all these "worldly" aims; he wooed the toiling