But perhaps this sympathetic attitude to Labor was too much to expect of a form of Christianity which had such an origin and such associations as Protestantism. Like the form of Christianity which it largely displaced in the freedom-loving northern races of Europe and America, it has rendered great services. Like that again, it was, perhaps, the only sort of Christianity possible under the conditions under which it took its form. It has helped to train an energetic, daring, self-reliant, and relatively honorable people. It has been the Christianity of a _bourgeois_ epoch, and with the passing of that epoch it, too, will pass away or undergo a profound metamorphosis. It is a very different sort of Christianity that will meet the religious needs of the new epoch that the world is entering. III. The Labor phase, A.D. 1914-- We have seen how the trading and manufacturing towns pushed their way up during the later period of the medieval age and eventually overthrew aristocracy in state and Church, substituting a social and political order and a Church dominated by the business class. Similarly, since the middle of the last century, a new force has been pushing up in the _bourgeois_ regime, destined, it now seems clear, to effect a similar transformation. This is organized Labor. The most significant feature in the social development of the last hundred years has been the patient, persistent, oft-defeated, yet insuppressible struggle of the proletariat of the western world for human rights. The dead weight of the bygone ages was upon it. When had the men and the women who did the rough and necessary work of the world, smoothed the highways, dug the drains, built the houses and the bridges, carried the burdens over the mountains and across the seas, tilled the fields and cared for the herds and the flocks--when had they been other than the despised, ill-paid, ill-housed servants of the classes who through their fighting-power or their money-power could command the services of the toilers? What right had they to overturn the ancient order, an order which history recognized and the Church was willing to consecrate? Against the established order, against religious sanctions, against the combined authority of wealth and rank, against the legislative and military powers of governments, the workers had to carry on their new, uncharted, and desperate struggle unaided and alone. The Universities from their academic heights looked down on it with calm scientific interest. If any feeling was stirred, it was oftener contempt than pity. Even the Church of Christ was, with a few illustrious exceptions, unfriendly or timidly neutral. Nevertheless, in spite of calamitous setbacks, the movement made way against the public opinion of the dominant classes, against hostile legislation, against anarchic injunctions, against police and soldiers, and to-day Labor is the mightiest organized force in the world.