The majority of men, however, fail to appreciate Jesus' social teachings, because they think of him as far removed from the complex social programme presented by our highly developed civilization; but the enlightened historian well knows that between the first century in which Jesus lived and our own there are many startlingly close analogies. In Jesus' day the old racial and national bonds had been largely destroyed and many ancient traditions and customs had been rudely shattered or else cast aside. Men were sharply divided into classes separated by clashing interests. Industrial slavery held great masses of men in a bondage that was both physical and moral. Herded together in congested districts of the great cities that had suddenly sprung into existence, they lived a life that was in many respects worse than that of the beast. Lax divorce laws and looser marital relations had undermined the integrity of the home. A great wave of social immorality was destroying the physical and spiritual health of the individual and of society. At the same time mankind was beginning to feel its unity and to work out its problems in universal terms. The yearning for brotherhood and for vital bonds that would bind each man to his fellows was strong. Consciously or unconsciously men everywhere were seeking for a satisfying philosophy of life that would afford them peace and happiness in this life and a definite hope of even greater joy in the realm beyond. They were also longing for a social organization that would give them freedom and an opportunity for each to live his life to the full. Dissatisfaction with the outworn social programmes of the past was expressed on every side. The expectancy of a dawn of a new day was almost universal. Practically every type of social programme known to us to-day was found in that old Roman world. Rome, in name still a republic, was in reality an imperial monarchy, ruled absolutely by the will of one man. It was a typical representative of the ancient autocratic idea of government. The old Hebrew commonwealth, like the city states of Greece, was only a memory of the past, but it stood for the democratic ideal--the rule of the people, by the people, for the people--in which the ultimate authority was vested in a popular assembly. Subject to the rule of Rome, the later Jewish hierarchical form of government still survived in Jerusalem as a representative of that peculiar type of social organization in which religious and temporal authority are blended. The rule of the rabble, to be instituted by violence and revolution and maintained by force, found its protagonists in those bloody, relentless Bolshevists of the first century, the Zealots. They only waited the leader and the opportunity to fly at the throats of their Roman masters and to make a mad attempt to overthrow all existing forms of government. On the ruins of society they wished to set up a Jewish state that would rule the rest of mankind with a rod of iron.