Consequently there come crises in history when questions that have been closed for centuries suddenly yawn wide open. It was in the teeth of one of these terrible yawns that St Paul cried that there are no closed questions, that we must think out everything for ourselves all over again. In his Jewish world nothing was more sacred than the law of Moses, and nothing more indispensable than the rite of circumcision. All law and all religion seemed to depend on them; yet St Paul had to ask the Jews to throw over the law of Moses for the contrary law of Christ, declaring that circumcision did not matter, as it was baptism that was essential to salvation. How could he help preaching the open mind and the inner light as against all laws and institutions whatever? You are now in the position of the congregations of St Paul. We are all in it today. A question that has been practically closed for a whole epoch, the question of the distribution of wealth and the nature of property, has suddenly yawned wide open before us; and we all have to open our closed minds accordingly. When I say that it has opened suddenly, I am not forgetting that it never has been closed completely for thoughtful people whose business it was to criticize institutions. Hundreds of years before St Paul was born, prophets crying in the wilderness had protested against the abominations that were rampant under the Mosaic law, and prophesied a Savior who would redeem us from its inhumanity. I am not forgetting either that for hundreds of years past our own prophets, whom we call poets or philosophers or divines, have been protesting against the division of the nation into rich and poor, idle and overworked. But there comes finally a moment at which the question that has been kept ajar only by persecuted prophets for a few disciples springs wide open for everybody; and the persecuted prophets with their tiny congregations of cranks grow suddenly into formidable parliamentary Oppositions which presently become powerful Governments. Langland and Latimer and Sir Thomas More, John Bunyan and George Fox, Goldsmith and Crabbe and Shelley, Carlyle and Ruskin and Morris, with many brave and faithful preachers, in the Churches and out of them, of whom you have never heard, were our English prophets. They kept the question open for those who had some spark of their inspiration; but prosaic everyday women and men paid no attention until, within my lifetime and yours, quite suddenly ordinary politicians, sitting on the front benches of the House of Commons and of all the European legislatures, with vast and rapidly growing bodies of ordinary respectable voters behind them, began clamoring that the existing distribution of wealth is so anomalous, monstrous, ridiculous, and unbearably mischievous, that it must be radically changed if civilization is to be saved from the wreck to which all the older civilizations we know of were brought by this very evil.