formers from St. Augustine who preached that the end of the world was at hand, to John Brown who wished to free the slaves in America. Had St. Paul told every side of the case of Christianity vs. Paganism, there is little doubt that St. Paul would have failed in his mission as religious reformer; but the method of the prophet is to magnify one side of a subject and repress all qualifications on the opposite side; harrowing the very soul of his hearers by terrifying word-pictures of death and damnation, near at hand. From time to time as our history proceeds we shall have much to say of Affirmation as an historical principle, especially showing the surprising influence of agitation of ideas on the rise of the Common Man. Jeremiah exclaims: "Among my people are found wicked men; they lay in wait, as he that setteth snares; they set a trap; they catch men. As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full of conceit. It is the old, old story repeated since the world began, the story of inevitable human selfishness. Yet in spite of pretentions to oracular wisdom, the prophets made many blunders in forecasting. Samuel in response to urging, finally gave in to the Jews who had demanded a king as against the old-time theocratic-democracy. named king, but that showed poor judgment on Samuel's part. Saul was a physical giant, or as the Bible says, "from his shoulders and upwards he was higher than any of his people." Saul became king of Israel about 1095 B. C. Saul was This king Saul, regardless of the fact that he had been certified by a prophet as a choice young man of the tribe of Benjamin, proved a stupid king. Saul, poet as well as musician, proved himself a poor leader. At best, Saul was merely a general who obeyed the suggestions of the prophet Samuel. David, warrior-king, excellent business manager, organized the army, fixed the capital at Jerusalem and demanded extreme piety from all his people, as the rule of life. Solomon, the next king, was a type of magnificent Oriental. He conscripted 180,000 Jews to work on the temple; of these, 80,000 were wood-choppers, who cut down the cedars of Lebanon, 70,000 others acted as human pack-horses to drag the timbers to the scene of operations, and 30,000 more did finishing work. Solomon's empire reached to the Euphrates and the splendor of his court outshone Nineveh and Tyre. Taxes were very high in Israel; also of the multitudes that worked on the big temple, few received pay. Under the ancient law, debtors became bond-slaves of the money-loaners. Sargon, man-god, decrees that value should As has already been alluded to, the Jews were eventually sold into bondage in Babylon; but more important still is it to know that Babylon was built on spears, on trampling of bodies; on rivers of blood;-for in that faroff time again and again, innumerable hosts marched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. A conquering race comes up out of the sand-clouds of the desert, a race wise in its own generation, hardened by miseries of centuries, and fit for the fray. History calls the new fighting men, Men of Agada, of Semitic stock, great to endure, great to plan, great to demand: They wore beards, had coarse, black hair and their skulls were long and narrow. In the 700's B. C., the mighty man among them, was Sargon; and Sargon fought so fiercely and had a will so tough and an ambition so wide that in a short time this powerful brawler had conquered Babylonia as well as territory 500 miles round about, reaching to the Mediterranean, making himself ruler or god (722 B. C.) over many motley races, near and far. Sargon's mother was a slave; his father he never knew; the legend suggests Moses and the bulrushes. The infant Sargon, abandoned by the mother, floated in a basket-boat, we know not how far or how long. In those ancient fables of kings, we do not go far before we meet the inevitable goddess. "Akki, the small farmer, brought Me to land and reared Me as his son and Me became a toiler in the garden for many years, till came the goddess Ishtar . . . ... Of course, a fierce military master, or god-ruler like Sargon, always set forth that he was successful because of the aid of supernatural powers; his own mighty strength suffices to crush the lion by hugging the beast to death; also he reports his fighting off, single-handed, 10,000 soldiers of the enemy. It is all very human and very old, this desire of men to link their lives with the immortal gods. The amiable practice goes on, to this hour. Sargon should be extolled for his irrigation canals, his grain warehouses, and especially for his decree that value should be allowed for property condemned. He enjoined by law that medicinal oils should be sold at a low rate. Is there not something quite modern about this Sargon's occasional sense of natural justice? The law about the oil is one of the earliest efforts to help the Common Man by curbing prices of necessities of life. CHAPTER VII THE STONE OF BEHISTUN Historical importance of time-weathered of rise of Common Man. Already, 400 B. C., we come across a strange stone on which is carved what in effect is among the earliest certified records embodying the theory of Divine right of kings. The matter of the Stone of Behistun (rock inscription of Darius) has heretofore been summarily dismissed as a mere episode in archæology. On the contrary, the significance of the message on this rock offers a landmark in social evolution. In its way, the Stone of Behistun is wholly as surprising an exhibit as is Magna Charta: for while Magna Charta sets forth a protest against autocratic power (1215 A. D.) the Stone of Behistun (400's B. C.) already proclaims the world belongs by Divine right to the ruthless military-master Darius the Great, worthy successor of mighty Sargon whose surprising genius in war together with the bearing of his life on the rise of the Common Man we have just outlined. That absolute monarch Darius (d. 485 B. C.) filled a large space in Persia, Egypt, Greece and on the Aegean sea. His glory and his shame are bound up with millions of slaves trampled under the wheels of war-chariots, lost at sea, thrown from runaway horses in battle, pierced through the head with arrows, stabbed in the side with spears. Such is the meaning of the word Darius. In this connection, it is enough to know that Darius, military-master of the first barbarian order, spent a long and tempestuous career fighting, marauding, looting. He crossed the Bosphorus on a bridge of boats and his myriads of Persian archers darkened the sun with their flights of arrows. Thrace and Macedonia gave up the ghost; Egypt was taken under the sword; and when Babylonia tried to break away, Darius punished with fire. Then, out of the ruins, Darius proceeded to build up Persia. He divided it into 120 departments or satrapies, each in charge of a master-butcher in the military line; the satraps were local tyrants whose business was to see that the annual tribute of gold was brought by camelback to Darius' mighty capital, Susa. Finally, while in the midst of preparations for a third looting of Greece, the barbarian king's time was up, death struck him in a twinkling, and Darius became level with the corpse of the most miserable slave in all Persia, the corpse rotting in the sun by the roadside, where the vultures wheel to pick the bones. So much for Darius. But no sooner had the breath left his body than Xerxes, son of Atossa, the second wife, made a new bridge of boats and with 2,000,000 archers and spearmen crossed once more the blue Hellispont, bent on the everlasting destruction of Greece. It is as a tale that is told, the naval battle of Salamis, the tigerstrife at Plataea, to the utter ruin of the Persian ambition. The fleeing hosts, and ships, and horses, were blown as by a mighty Greek hurricane-till no man knew the end. Then, the supreme tragedy, inevitable, always hovering near to seal the military-master's doom. There is always some other man who wishes to be king. come, why not? . . . and Artabanus with a dagger lets out Xerxes' life (465 B. C.). Yet the irony of human existence is nowhere shown in more sombre colors. To think that all this fame, all these vast adventures of Darius, son of Hystaspes, should come down to us largely through a half-obliterated record cut on a rock. On Darius' stone we find a very early expression of the Divine right of kings, perhaps the earliest of formal story-and this clue in the Persian desert, is directly linked with Divine right, down into modern times. It is a long trail often lost, but now and then we come across ancient landmarks, as for example the Stone of Behistun. And of this Stone no man could read the message for many centuries. Darius' gen |