There are few passages, I venture to think, in English sacred poetry more sublime in their conception of the Divine figure of Christ than this last section of Langland's vision. True, the figure of the Christ he reveals to us in His final triumph is no imperial king reigning supreme in far-off splendour in the glory of the heavenly palaces, or as in the Christian saga-poem of Cynewulf, of which I spoke to you last week-leading to battle his thegns and æthelings with the evil host of wicked angels, and casting them down to doom in hell; but a figure of the homely and the friendly Christ, dwelling with humble men, helping them with their crafts, teaching them to plough and to ditch, and to live a leal life and a true: a Divine Comrade, "who standeth at the right hand of the Poor," who "in all their afflictions was afflicted, and by the Angel of His Presence "-the presence of a very human Christ-"saved them," and who also was full of care and concern for the wider good of the common weal: a Reformer, an Emancipator of the captive and the oppressed, the Champion of social rights, the Inspirer of social duty, the revealer of a social ideal for England in the future-a golden age in which folk of every grade shall have learnt to "Do well, to do better, to do best."

And what, my friends, is the lesson of this fourteenthcentury poem? Is it not this?

"Jesus Christ of heaven

In poor man's apparell pursueth us ever."

The possibility, that is to say, that the full likeness to Jesus Christ, the ideal Son of God, is stored up in

the Plowman, in the common man of the street, and of the mill, and of the workshop; this, I think, is the lesson, which is at the very heart of William Langland's message to his countrymen. It is, in fact, because of his insistence upon the principle, revealed by Jesus Christ, that humanity wherever it may be found has an infinite value, and that consequently the common man is the true unit of measure, not only for the franchise of the Catholic Church, but also for the Christian State, that his Vision has its chief interest for us to-day, as a picture of those forces which, in reaction from fourteenth-century Papalism and Feudalism, were gradually building up that idea of duty which gave to the England of the next two centuries that social conscience-that reformer's conscience-which is the necessary coefficient of safe Democracy.

There is no need, I think, to discriminate between those elements of the Puritan movement which we may directly trace to the influence of the rediscovered Bible and those which it inherits from the Mother Church

of the Middle Ages. The former are more evident, perhaps, in Langland's Vision. But the latter, including that element of Individualism which, in order to find itself, shut itself up in a monastery, are there also. Both, indeed, are inseparable. For no one, in these days of historical criticism, could surely imagine that it was possible for a single generation to take a broad jump, as it were, over the thirty generations preceding it, and to come down on the clear ground of Biblical truth.

Some wise man of our own day has said "that the key of the fourteenth century is to be found in the hand of Dante." And we may, I think, assent to that statement, if only we recognise that the witness to the Christian belief in the consecration of all human society to a definite moral end, as part of the purpose of God, which is expressed in the "De Monarchia " of Dante, and in his "Divina Commedia," is based, just as the "Vision of Piers Plowman " by William Langland is based, on the necessity of finding an answer to this very simple question, "How to reconcile the daily conduct of the average Christian with the revealed principles of his religion?" Reduced to simplest terms, that is the question which is at the back of that great social problem which has faced the Church of Christ throughout her age-long history. For is it not true that most of the sects and parties which have been condemned by the Church as heretical - Montanists, Paulicians, Waldenses, the Fraticelli, the "Poor Priestes of Wycliff, the Lollards, the Anabaptists, unconnected with each other in their origin-all bear on their face the mark of a common descent from a single principle, namely, the desire to act on a literal interpretation of Christ's precepts without any regard to the reserves of Church tradition or worldly experience? And yet,

indeed, from the first it has been felt by the Church itself that the authoritative leaders and teachers of Christianity could not safely trust the interpretation of the moral law of Christ, much less the practical application of Christ's spiritual principles to life, entirely to the intuitive perceptions of each individual Christian, or

even less perhaps to the average public opinion of each individual group or church of Christians. There must, they thought, be some legitimate place for the principle of authority in relation to the Discipline of the Christian life equally as in relation to the Doctrines of the Christian faith. And they were right. The privilege of the individual conscience, the right of private judgment— Individualism, in a word-was and is, of course, of the very essence of Christianity; but Individualism, it ought never to be forgotten, if it is to be truly ethical, must put itself wholly into social relationship. Only a perfect individual, perfectly knowing and mastering himself, can be truly in society, and only in society can a man become a perfect individual.

For the imperfect individual, then, for the unus multorum (Horace, Satires, i. ix. 71, 72), for the ordinary Christian, for the average citizen of the world, the kingdom of God upon earth-revealed as an ideal for all time in Christ's Sermon on the Mount-that poem of the world's second springtide-bringing to men new social chances, new social impulses, new guarantees for civilised life, will always seem too ideal. The counsels of the Sermon will always seem to him "counsels of perfection." He will crave, therefore, always for a more positive discipline, a more precise plan of life, a fixed code of morals, mapping out the whole department of conduct with prescribed maxims and definite rules.

And the history of the Church, we know, at least, on its institutional side, has largely been a record of the attempt to supply this need for the imperfect individual.

We are all quite aware how in the slow alchemy of history, the evangelic liberty, the spontaneous enthusiasm of the Sermon on the Mount came to be gradually transmuted into the case-bound legalism of the Latin penitentials with their ghastly catalogues of imagined possibilities of sin, each with their own specific remedy. The Free Church of the primitive age, such as Jesus had conceived it (S. Matt. xviii. 20), such as S. Paul a generation later had still understood it (2 Cor. i. 21), such as Tertullian (Apolog. 39) and Origen (Celsus 3, 51) had described it, seemed to the legal precisians of the end of the third century little better than the promise of an anarchic Utopia. The fourth century did not close before the victory of the Roman spirit of legalism was complete. The "De Officiis Ministrorum" of S. Ambrose of Milan, with its fusion of the Roman conception of personal rights with the stoic conception of reciprocal relations, is but a rechauffée of Cicero's "Manual of Morals," compiled three centuries earlier. And although the "De Civitate Dei" of Augustine does indeed outline a new ideal of the kingdom of God upon earth, it is no longer the primitive conception of the Sermon on the Mount, but a Roman ideal in which the Empire takes its place within the Church, and the Church sets itself to the great secular task regere imperio populos. Nine centuries later, when the complex system of mediæval discipline was completely codified (as, for example, in the "De Poenitentia" of Gratian's "Decretals," or in the second part of the "Summa" of S. Thomas Aquinas) the Church of Christ appears as no other than ancient imperial Rome itself, regaining its authority over the