128 Contemporary Evolution. 



associations can be more likely to suggest democratic ideas to 

 enthusiastic minds sprung, it may be, from poor parents, and them- 

 selves waging a continual warfare with the secular powers ? The 

 religion thus founded was the heir of an older faith which in its 

 noblest development was an eminent protest against arrogance and 

 oppression. ' Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl/ though it 

 occurs in an apostolic epistle, reproduces exactly the spirit of the 

 Hebrew prophets. St. Paul's teaching lends itself to a similar 

 application. A great orator who had persuaded himself that the 

 success of his preaching depended on his carrying the multitude 

 with him would hardly desire a better text than < God hath chosen the 

 weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty ; 

 and base things of the world, and things which are despised, yea, 

 and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.' At 

 present he would be hampered in handling his subject. He is not on 

 the whole desirous of disturbing the existing order of secular affairs, 

 and he would therefore have to explain that St. Paul's words were to 

 be taken in a strictly spiritual sense. But assume him to have 

 become a declared enemy of the existing order of secular affairs, and 

 so to be emancipated from the restrictions which now fetter his 

 eloquence, and he will have a vantage-ground from which to move 

 democratic passion such as no merely secularist preacher is likely to 

 share. The clergy need not even go so far back as the origin of their 

 religion. The history of its youth and manhood is full of associations 

 which point in the same direction. The glory of the mediaeval 

 Church is the resistance which it offered to tyranny of every kind. 

 The typical bishop of those times is always upholding a righteous 

 cause against kings and emperors, or exhorting masters to let their 

 slaves go free, or giving sanctuary to harassed fugitives, or protecting 

 the infant town against some neighbouring feudal lord, or inspiring 

 the villagers whom their lord has deserted to make head against 

 a piratical inroad, or joining with the better disposed barons in setting 

 bounds to kingly aggression. What is true of the bishops is true in 

 a still more eminent degree of the religious orders. Whether they 

 aimed at guiding men by putting wealth to noble uses, or by 

 neglecting it altogether, their object was equally to identify them- 



