ers were designated as "those that have turned the world upside down
... doing contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another
king, one Jesus" (Acts XVII, 6 and 7).

It is well known that the early Christian church was persecuted because,
from the first, it preached a total regeneration of human society and its
reestablishment of a basis of peace and good-will, social equality,
absolute justice, mutual aid, respect and sympathy, unselfish,
disinterested subservience of the individual to the interest of the
community.

It was for the sublime principle of a religious democracy and the
regeneration of human society that, in an age of tyranny, oppression and
bloodshed, the early Christian martyrs laid down their lives. The
foundations of religious orders were as many attempts to realize the
Christian ideal, and to this day the Roman Catholic Church, whose clergy
and religious orders unquestionably afford a splendid living example of
devotion to a common cause, self-abnegation, obedience and humility,
clings to the ideal of a state in which temporal power is wielded by a
hierarchy raised to rulership from all ranks, merely by virtue of
personal, moral and intellectual qualities. Throughout the Christian
church the ideal of religious democracy prevails. Each day it is prayed
for in the words "Thy kingdom come," by those taught to look forward to
the promise of the time when "former things are passed away and a holy
Jerusalem shall descend out of heaven from God, lying four-square, with
twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels and names written thereon
which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel ... and
the wall of the city had twelve foundations and in them the names of the
twelve apostles of the Lamb,.... And I saw no temple therein, for the Lord
God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple in it ... but the throne of God
and of the Lamb shall be in it.... And he showed me a pure river of water
of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the
Lamb. In the midst of the street of it and on either side of the river was
there a tree of life, which bore twelve manner of fruits and yielded her
fruit every month ..." (Revelation, chaps. XXI and XXII).

It appears significant, in the light of the present investigation, that
the birth of Christianity, as well as the revival of pagan systems of
philosophy, embodying principles for the organization of religious
brotherh