first, teachers of humility and brotherly love; and Francis,
himself, modeled his life after that of Jesus as he conceived him. The
disciples of Wycliffe made their home among the peasantry and artisans
of Mediaeval England. John Ball is a good interpreter to us of the
social outlook they nourished. It appears that they thought of Jesus
as like one of themselves, read his life in terms of their own pressing
problems. Pietism and methodism have always inclined toward the gospel
Jesus in preference to the Pauline Christ; but their social outlook was
far too negative and passive. Democracy must be aggressive,
non-mystical, triumphant. It must exalt reason while not forgetting
tenderness. With the growth of modern democracy of a socialistic kind,
Jesus the Carpenter with his kindly word for the poor and downtrodden
and his scorn for {74} the haughty and rich has become the symbol and
sign of a new social ethics. It is evident that religion is not
independent of the social temper of an age. Religion points to the
seat of power as a compass points to the pole. When man's sore need
made him cry out for mercy and succor in the primitive days, his
ignorant helplessness inevitably peopled nature with gods of fertility.
Illusion and need created the gods of myth and ritual. Remove this
setting of ignorance and illusion, and put in its place a sense of
power, and need will point to the proper use of that power. Justice
and mercy and reason, used socially for a social purpose, will surely
become the religion of an intelligent democracy. In the older forms of
religion, man was a petitioner holding out helpless hands of prayer; in
the religion to come, man will be a creator bravely taking his destiny
into his own hands. What a reversal! Yet it is no greater than the
contrast between the primitive world we have been studying, with its
mana and taboos and magic, and the modern world with its knowledge of
chemistry and electricity and its deep probing into the very soul of
man.

But we must return to the explanation of the popular tendency to exalt
the man Jesus over the Pauline Christ. Is the explanation far to seek?
Theology of a recondite character has always been the expression of
reflection and leisure. The religion of the masses has always been, on
the contrary, in terms of pictures and emotions connected with their
everyday needs. The rabbinical concepts of Paul were foreign to their
experience, while the philoso