Who the darkness thickly scattereth

With starry words which shoot prevailing light
Into the deeps, and wither with the blight
Of serene Truth the coward heart of Death
A poet cannot strive for despotism;

His harp falls shattered; for it still must be
The instinct of great spirits to be free,
And the sworn foes of cunning barbarism.
He who has deepest searched the wide abysm
Of that life-giving Soul which men call fate,
Knows that to put more faith in lies and hate
Than truth and love, is the worst atheism.

Far 'yond this narrow parapet of Time,
With eyes uplift, the poet's soul should look
Into the Endless Promise, nor should brook
One prying doubt to shake his faith sublime." 55

No "prying doubt" was couched in the written roll which John brought back to Ephesus. He had seen the vision of true government, "coming down out of heaven from God and ready as a bride adorned for her husband." To Ephesus first, his own church, he had a theocratic word.

"Thou canst not bear evil men, and didst try them that call themselves apostles, and are not, and didst find them false; and thou hast patience, and didst bear for my name's sake, and hast not grown weary. This thou hast, that thou hatest the work of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate But I have this against thee, that thou didst leave thy first love. Remember therefore whence thou art fallen, and repent and do the first works, or else I come to thee, and will remove thy candlestick out of its place, except thou repent.... He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches." 56

The Nicolaitans were pagans who had gotten into the church and were persuading the church to draw aside into idle speculations when the church was called into existence to accomplish the kingdom of God on earth. Ephesus was the commercial emporium of its district. It was filled with traders who were worshippers of profit, and who are perhaps in John's mind in the imagery of the fall of Babylon, "the mother

of the abominations of the earth," by "the power of whose wantonness the merchants of the earth waxed rich." There is no stronger condemnation of anything that is writen into a New Testament writing concerning persons with whom the church was coquetting, than the scathing description in the 18th chapter of Revelation:

"the merchants who were made rich by her (the mother of the abominations, "Babylon"), shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and mourning; saying, Woe, woe, the great city, wherein all that had their ships in the sea were made rich by reason of her costliness!

We are upon the most seductive enemy of the Kingdom of God in the passage-costliness. Costliness is the bastard of avarice, the progeny of Satan, the pagan enemy of the Kingdom of God, the remorseless principle of cruelty and oppression, the progenitor of the brood of lies that plague the world with its lusts, its hatreds, its wars, its moral wreckage, its spiritual presumption, its loathsomeness, disease, famine and death. Costliness is enmity with God. Costliness, we shall find Ricardo saying in a later chapter, advances the program that the "Bounty of Providence may be a curse to any country." 57

It cannot be said that the Church was implicated in this costliness. Significantly, the Church is not mentioned again after the third chapter of the apocalypse in all the nineteen chapters that follow until the curtain is falling. Then John receives his commision to carry the testimony of his vision to the Churches.

What a testimony of his suspense during his vision the seer brings back from his exile!

Listening attentively to the mighty shout prolonged in the first three verses of the 18th of the recorded apocalypse; attentive as well as the reverberating echoes of th Hallelujah Chorus

of the first three verses of the 19th chapter; turning his welltuned ear to the recurrent theme of the 13th verse of the 18th chapter, concerning the world-corrupting avarice that needed to be dethroned, preserving the details of his vision of this avarice as it appears and reappears in the 11th, in the 15th, in the 17th, in the 19th, 20th, and 23d verses of the same chapter; gathering the notes of the social havoc that followed this avarice of the princes of fortune, whose money and whose greed is at the bottom of the calamitous scenes, the sorrows of which are rocking heaven with the anathemas that are pronounced on the untheocratic earth-rule; swayed with the shouts of triumph that accompany the downfall of all government that exalts itself above the knowledge of God; sympathetic to the choice of the figure of 'Babylon,'-the most seductive, abandoned and unprincipled of queens, whose wantonness has corrupted the earth; burning with the revelation that in her "was found the blood of prophets and saints, and of all that have been slain upon the earth;" (18. 23-4); glad with the gladness of heaven, over the figure that is chosen to symbolize the utimate triumph of the Kingdom of God-the bride, to whom "it was given that she should array herself in fine linen, bright and pure, the fine linen which is the righteous acts of the saints;" (19. 7-8); rejoicing in heaven's joy once again over the ultimate advent of theocratic earth-rule: "And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of the throne saying, Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with them, and they shall be his peoples, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.” (21. 2-3.).

Not John's tower in the cleft of the lifted rock, but the exalted vision of the power of God in the end to accomplish in the realm of human government that resistless energy and alacrity of good-will which, in its undeviating trueness and in its untiring correspondence with the outgiving love of the divine Mind, will be the spiritual counterpart of that ethereal process of willingess, constancy, trueness and illuminative companionship which we call light:-this is the watch-tower of theocratic democracy-the height from which we must look across all obstacles, and all necessary tarrying of the appointed time; while we serve, extend our love, expand our powers, project the Brotherhood of Christ, and wait.

In this service, and in this waiting, the spirit of fidelity and wonderment that actuated John the seer may actuate us:-"I John, your bother and partaker with you in the tribulation and kingdom and patience ... was in the isle that was called Patmos, for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day."

In his skyward cave, banished from the commercial emporium whose polity and principles were at war with the Kingdom of God, and so wholly at variance with theocratic government, the patient, accordant, loving John, our brother! John, held spellbound above the moaning sea, over against the stars, by the sights and sounds of the great contributing world which exists to hearten and inspire all who,

U

CHAPTER V

Songs of Democracy

"Once hardly in a cycle blossometh

A flower-like soul ripe with the seeds of song,
A spirit foreordained to cope with wrong,
Whose divine thoughts are natural as breath.
************

Woe if such spirit sell his birthright high

And mock with lies the longing soul of man!
Yet one age longer must true Culture lie,
Soothing her bitter fetters as she can,

Until new messages of love outstart

At the next beating of the infinite Heart." 58

NDOUBTEDLY the coming of democracy into

its heritage has been delayed by a mishap with

regard to its songs. Not merely delay, but incalculable suffering has been occasioned by this mishap. The de

lay has been innocent enough. No charge can be preferred against anybody for keeping back the songs from the people. From the nature of the case it could hardly have been otherwise. The fact simply stands, that songs upon songs that express the passionate beating of the hearts of the people for direct government under the guidance of the 'infinite Heart,' have miscarried.

And yet the songs have not been lost. It is even to be said, that in an inferior form they repose on some shelf in almost every home of every enlightened land of Christendom. In thousands and tens of thousands of homes that are bursting for song-often directly before the eyes of the people-the most inspiring poetry of the longing of the human heart, the most transcendent literature of the triumphs of the human instinct, is at hand, unrecognized.

This is so, very largely because titles have been given to the songs that are misleading, and because words have been put into the songs that are misleading. From the nature of the case these alterations have rather tended to create, either indifference and confusion, or false security and unfruitful speculation. Again it must be said that blame can attach to no one for these alterations. The songs are very old. They fell into the hands of men who were limited in their information. These men were short of knowledge as to how to mark and classify the songs. The prevailing opinion was, that the name of a great singer of antiquity could be safely written as part of the title of very many of the songs. This notwithstanding the fact that centuries had elapsed between the death of this singer and the writing of the songs.