o general recognition"
(Lotze). Lowell's "Present Crisis" is perhaps the most powerful poetical
expression of the prophetic function in history.

"Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes--they were souls that stood
alone,
While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,
Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline
To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,
By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design.

"By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding feet I track,
Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back,
And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned
One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath
burned
Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven
upturned."

II

During the centuries when the Church was herself in need of redemption and
her purification was resisted by the dominant ecclesiastical interests,
such prophetic spirits as Arnold of Brescia, Wycliffe, Huss, and
Savonarola were most frequently found battling for the freedom of the
Church from the despotic grafters inside and outside of the hierarchy, and
for the purity of the gospel. The Church was a chief part of the social
order, and the reform of the Church was the preeminent social problem.
Today the Church is on the whole free from graft, and as openminded as the
state of public intelligence permits it to be. Therefore the prophet minds
are now set free to fight for the freedom of the people in political
government and for the substitution of cooperation for predatory methods
in industry, and the clash is most felt on that field.

The law of prophetic suffering holds true as much as ever. Probably no
group of men have ever undertaken to cleanse a city of profit-making vice
without being made to suffer for it. In the last thirty years this country
has watched eminent men in public life in various great cities making a
sincere drive to break the grip of a grafting police machine, or of a
political clique, or of public service corporations. For a while such a
man has public sentiment with him, for all communities have a desire to be
moral. But when it becomes clear that he really means what he says, and
that important incomes will be hurt, powerful forces set on him with abuse
and ridicule, try to wreck his business or