ld, the hire
of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept
back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are
entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth." Here is denunciation
hot and stirring, and the preacher may at times have to denounce, and
when the time comes, must face that duty manfully for the sake of God
and men. On this page, however, we plead not for denunciation but for
idealism,--idealism supported by the truths of the Fatherhood of God
and the Brotherhood of Man, and enforced by all the tender meanings of
the Cross.

For the world of statesmanship, again, the preacher has a teaching of
idealism, which is a very different thing from the preaching of party
politics, which has done more harm a thousand times than any good it
has ever effected. In the nation as Christ would have it there should
be no jealousy between class and class; no oppression of the poor by
the rich; no reproach for either honest poverty or honest wealth. In
such a state there would be a chance for every man. Government would
not mean tyranny; liberty would not mean licence. There would be
purity of administration. There would be consecration of national
resources to the good of all. War, by such a state, would be as
impossible as it is now imminent. In such a state, again, sermons on
the text, "Our country right or wrong," would neither find preachers to
deliver them nor audiences to listen to them. When the New Jerusalem
is built in England, the slum, the gin palace, the workhouse, and the
gaol will be things of the past. "Thus saith the Lord of Hosts; there
shall yet old men and old women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, and
every man with his staff in his hand for very age. And the streets of
the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets
thereof." Oh, the dream is overpowering in its glory; and it is not a
dream, but a prophecy from Calvary to the sorrowing nations of a sinful
world!

So the errand of the preacher is to declare the Golden Age for which
men have longed with, oh, such longing! amid the sins, and crimes, and
miseries which have made up so much of human history. Of this so
greatly desired time have they dreamed. To bring it in they have
schemed and laboured, bled and died. They have thought to hasten its
dawn by the founding of "Utopias," of "Merrie Englands," by many a
promising, but disappointing device. There is but one man who can tell