Down along the rocky banks of the brook Kedron, less than fifteen miles from Jerusalem, lived the Essene brotherhoods. They represented the purest type of communistic socialism. All property was held in common. The results of the labor of each went into the common store. All shared alike their possessions. It was also a nobler communism than we know to-day, for its chief aim was not the division of the products of human enterprise, but the lofty and unselfish ideals of serving and uplifting humanity. The learned scribes and Pharisees were dreaming of a far different type of world state: one that was to be suddenly and miraculously established. Jerusalem was to be its capital and a Jewish Messiah its head. The faithful martyrs who had died for their religion were to be reincarnated to share its glories. The heathen nations were to be subdued and the rule of Israel's God was to be recognized throughout the whole earth. Only a few humble students of the prophets and psalmists were quietly working and hoping for a society in which justice, good-will, and mutual helpfulness were to be the compelling bonds and the will of God the guiding authority. Autocracy and democracy, hierarchy and anarchy, communistic socialism and nationalistic theocracy each found enthusiastic devoted supporters in that vast laboratory of social experimentation in which Jesus lived. Every type of social programme that we know to-day was there represented. Did he have a social plan, and was it adapted to the needs of the twentieth as well as to those of the first Christian century? The records of Jesus' work are so fragmentary that they have given to most readers the impression that he was simply an itinerant preacher and teacher without definite plan and method. Paul is ordinarily regarded as the great organizer who gave Christianity its corporate form. A more careful study of the facts, however, reveals a clearly defined aim and a systematic, comprehensive plan underlying all of Jesus' work.