success there, the people said, "Is not this the carpenter's
son?" But Jesus's manner throughout is that of an aristocrat, or
at the very least the son of a rich bourgeois, and by no means a
lowly-minded one at that. We must be careful therefore to
conceive Joseph, not as a modern proletarian carpenter working
for weekly wages, but as a master craftsman of royal descent.
John the Baptist may have been a Keir Hardie; but the Jesus of
Matthew is of the Ruskin-Morris class.

This haughty characterization is so marked that if we had no
other documents concerning Jesus than the gospel of Matthew, we
should not feel as we do about him. We should have been much less
loth to say, "There is a man here who was sane until Peter hailed
him as the Christ, and who then became a monomaniac." We should
have pointed out that his delusion is a very common delusion
among the insane, and that such insanity is quite consistent with
the retention of the argumentative cunning and penetration which
Jesus displayed in Jerusalem after his delusion had taken
complete hold of him. We should feel horrified at the scourging
and mocking and crucifixion just as we should if Ruskin had been
treated in that way when he also went mad, instead of being cared
for as an invalid. And we should have had no clear perception of
any special significance in his way of calling the Son of God the
Son of Man. We should have noticed that he was a Communist; that
he regarded much of what we call law and order as machinery for
robbing the poor under legal forms; that he thought domestic ties
a snare for the soul; that he agreed with the proverb "The nearer
the Church, the farther from God;" that he saw very plainly that
the masters of the community should be its servants and not its
oppressors and parasites; and that though he did not tell us not