Loving your neighbor as you love yourself is poorly displayed in taxing him to build navies for the purpose of killing a lot of other people Christ loved and died for. Christ died to establish universal peace, but to judge him through the work of those who pretend to be his followers, he died for the purpose of ordaining priests and preachers to bless the armies and navies of civilization. As a boy I was taught to look upon the Jews as the rejecters, betrayers and crucifiers of Christ, the man sent of God to establish peace and good will. I was taught to look upon Judas Iscariot as the meanest of all men—the man who pretended to love Jesus, but who betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver. If I were a Jew, I would point to the Christian churches, pretending to love the people as Christ loved them, but openly turning the blessings of Christ from their natural channels of peace, to blessing the armies and navies that go out to do violence. Judas only betrayed Christ once, and was sorry for it, while the Christians betray him every day in the year, and boast of it. They boast of their armies and navies and sing their praises, feeling more secure in the ability of their armed forces than they do in the love of their Christ. Did the Jews do worse in rejecting Christ, then the Christians do in accepting him, and then disobey the newest commandment that came from his lips? They preach his gospel of peace and then organize for the purpose of destroying peace. If the Christian church turned against militarism, and abandoned the war departments in their efforts to enforce commercialism and the extension of trade, the war-loving people would not contribute their thirty pieces of silver. If I were a Jew I would set up the character of Judas against the work of the Christians in the betrayal of business. Judas was part of the original plan—to establish a living example of the perfidy attached to the work of treachery. Have the Christians profited by the example? Have they not deceitfully handed the gospel of Christ over to the enemies of peace? Have they loved one another similar to the love Christ died for? Are the slums of our large cities examples of Christ’s love for the lowly and the oppressed? Is the treatment of the Jews in Christian Russia an example of “Love your neighbor as yourself?” The more I think over the situation, the more I regret that I am not a Jew. MEMORIES The old people had been living in their village home long before I went there to become their neighbor. They had reared their family of five children in the old house, and they had all married and gone elsewhere to live. The old people were now past 65, and rather old for transplanting in a new home, but the death of a relative brought to their door a small fortune, and the children insisted that they must remove to the city and live in better style, as becomes people in affluent circumstances.