e interrogation to which the
inquisitive lad subjected the smug doctors in the temple.

There are but meagre accounts of the doings of Jesus until at a trifle
over thirty he entered upon his public "ministry" and began the campaign
of agitation and revolt he had been planning and dreaming through all
the years of his yearning and burning adolescence. He was of the working
class and loyal to it in every drop of his hot blood to the very hour of
his death. He hated and denounced the rich and cruel exploiter as
passionately as he loved and sympathized with his poor and suffering
victims.

"I speak not of you all; I know whom I have chosen," was his
class-conscious announcement to his disciples, all of whom were of the
proletariat, not an exploiter or desirable citizen among them. No, not
one! It was a working class movement he was organizing and a working
class revolution he was preparing the way for.

"A new commandment I give unto you: That ye love one another; as I have
loved you, that ye also love one another." This was the pith and core of
all his pleading, all his preaching, and all his teaching--love one
another, be brethren, make common cause, stand together, ye who labor to
enrich the parasites and are yourselves in chains, and ye shall be free!

These words were addressed by Jesus not to the money-changers, the
scribes and pharisees, the rich and respectable, but to the ragged
undesirables of his own enslaved and suffering class. This appeal was to
their class spirit, their class loyalty and their class solidarity.

Centuries later Karl Marx embodies the appeal in his famous manifesto
and today it blazes forth in letters of fire as the watchword of the
world-wide revolution: "_Workers of all countries unite: you have
nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to gain._"

During the brief span of three years, embracing the whole period of his
active life, from the time he began to stir up the people until "the
scarlet robe and crown of thorns were put on him and he was crucified
between two thieves," Jesus devoted all his time and all his matchless
ability and energies to the suffering poor, and it would have been
passing strange if they had not "heard him gladly."

He himself had no fixed abode and like the wretched, motley throng to
whom he preached and poured out his great and loving heart, he was a
poor wanderer on the face of the earth and "had not where to lay his
head."

Pure communism was t