The world looks very big to us, and any one who dares to interfere with the nice adjustment of its affairs him we always crucify, lest he bring destruction upon us by overturning the elaborate mechanism of our social order. In this lies our exculpation. If we crucified the Truth, we did it to save the world in which we lived. Bearing this in mind, the reader is invited to here follow our story, which has been translated into the conditions of modern American life, and then to decide how far he can blame us for fulfilling the destiny which God ordained for us. REJECTED OF MEN REJECTED OF MEN I THE VOICE OF ONE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS WHEN John the Baptist began preaching none of us of the more intelligent classes believed him to be really a prophet forerunning the coming of the Messiah. Indeed, the better part of the world knew in the beginning nothing of his presence in its midst; nor until we began to be aware that great streams of ignorant people were pouring out of the cities and towns and descending to listen to his preaching and to receive his baptism, were we aware that such a man was in existence. Then the public journals, those echoes of current thought and opinion, began to take the matter up, publishing longer and longer reports concerning him; commenting upon the growing excitement, the cause of which nobody seemed exactly to understand. People read what was printed and wondered what it all meant. Just what those poor people who flocked to the baptism of John expected to see or to hear--just what they expected to gain through his ministrations, it was impossible to say. If they had any real thought in the matter they did not tell to the world what it was they thought. For those of the lower class do not talk freely to those of the upper class about their ideas. With their intellectual superiors they are reserved, suspicious, and sometimes sullen. To the trained thinker the untrained mind appears remote, and its reasonings obscure. When, for instance, Dr. Caiaphas's assistant gardener came to that good clergyman in the middle of the week to ask him if he might be absent from work till the Monday following, and when the rector of the Church of the Advent asked the man if he were not going down to see the Baptist and why he went, he found his question confronted by just such logical obtuseness and inconsequence. "Why, you see, sir," said the man, "I did promise Molly I'd take her and her sister down to be baptized--that is, if you can spare me, sir--and there ain't much doing just now." "But suppose I can't spare you, Thomas?" "Oh, well, sir, it doesn't signify. I can stay, and Molly and her sister can go down theirselves." It was then that the rich, wise priest tried to get at the mind of the other man and failed. "Why do you want to go down to the baptism, Thomas?" he said. "Don't you get enough of God's truth preached to you at home without having to go there to find it?"