them,
And as they drew back their garment-hem
For fear of defilement, "Lo, here," said he,
'The images ye have made of me.' "

III

We shall get the historical setting for Christ's championship of the
people by going back to the Old Testament prophets. They were his
spiritual forebears. He nourished his mind on their writings and loved to
quote them. Now, the Hebrew prophets with one accord stood up for the
common people and laid the blame for social wrong on the powerful classes.
They underlined no other sin with such scarlet marks as the sins of
injustice, oppression, and the corruption of judges. But these are the
sins which bear down the lowly, and have always been practiced and hushed
up by the powerful. "Hear this word, ye kine of Bashan, that oppress the
poor, that crush the needy.... Ye trample upon the poor, and take
exactions from him of wheat; ... ye that afflict the just, that take a
bribe, and that turn aside the needy in the gate from their right.... For
three transgressions of Israel, yea, for four, I will not turn away the
punishment thereof; because they have sold the righteous for silver, and
the needy for a pair of shoes; they that pant after the dust of the earth
on the head of the poor" (Amos 4:1; 5:11-12; 2:6-7). Micah describes the
strong and crafty crowding the peasant from his ancestral holding and the
mother from her home by the devices always used for such ends, exorbitant
interest on loans, foreclosure in times of distress, "seeing the judge"
before the trial, and hardness of heart toward broken life and happiness
(Micah 2:1-2; 2:9; 3:1-2). We cannot belittle the moral insight of that
unique succession of men. Their spiritual force is still hard at work in
our Christian civilization, especially in the contribution which the
Jewish people are making to the labor movement.

IV

Among the Greeks and Romans political and literary life was so completely
dominated by the aristocratic class that no such succession of champions
of the common man could well arise. Yet some of the men of whom posterity
thinks with most veneration were upper-class champions of the common
people--Solon, for instance, Manlius, and the Gracchi.

In recent centuries the vast forces of social evolution seem to have set
in the direction toward which Jesus faced. Since the Reformation the
institutions of religion have been more or less democratized. The common
people have secured some participation i