lf had been born in a manger and when he was grown up he said
sorrowfully that "he had not where to lay his head." He did not despise
little children because they were poor and neglected and shabbily
dressed but he loved them all the more; and as he looked down upon them
his heart melted with compassion and the tears of tenderness filled his
eyes; and then he became grave and his fair brow grew dark with wrath as
he thought of those who sat in rich church pews and piously thanked the
Lord that they were not as other people. He denounced them as hypocrites
for pretending to be religious while they robbed the poor and turned the
little children into the street to suffer hunger and fall into evil
ways.

Nearly twenty centuries have passed since the suffering poor heard with
gladness the message of the Lowly Nazarene and since he was moved to
tears by the sight of the little children of the street, but the world
has not yet learned the meaning of his tender and touching words,
"Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me; for of
such is the kingdom of heaven." If he were to walk the streets of New
York or Chicago, or Lawrence, Massachusetts, or any of the cities where
the mills and sweatshops are filled with child slaves--as he once walked
the streets of Jerusalem--he would grow sick at heart as he saw the
little ones he so loved, pale and wan and worn, harnessed to monstrous
machines and slowly put to death to swell the profits of the greedy mill
owners who sit in the rich pews of the synagogue, as did the pharisees
he scourged without mercy twenty centuries ago.

The children of the working people have always been poor because the
world has never been just. For ages and ages those who have builded the
houses, cultivated the fields, raised the crops, spun the wool, woven
the cloth, supplied the food we eat and the clothes we wear, and
furnished the homes we live in, have been the poor and despised, while
those who profited by their labor and consumed the good things they
produced, have been the rich and respectable.

Jesus himself was a carpenter's son and suffered the poverty of his
class and when he grew up it was not the rich and respectable, but the
poor and despised who loved him, and opened their arms to receive him,
and heard gladly his tender and comforting ministrations. He was one of
them in poverty and suffering and in all his loving and self-denying
life he never forgot them. Had he deserted