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Christ brought to a dispirited world the doctrine of human dignity. His lesson is still to be learned.

He spoke to men whose worth to themselves had dropped to the cost of keeping alive, and He spoke of self-esteem. Only a few listened, only a remnant understood. When the scope of human aspirations is foreshortened by continued frustration and the primary instinct of living becomes the purpose of life, he who seeks to awaken hope speaks a strange and disturbing language. It was to men who had made adjustment with existence that Christ spoke, and they heard Him not.

The price of the political State came high. Its ally, the predatory priesthood, took its cut of production, and the remaining wage was at the subsistence level. Pharisaism, which is the art of rationalizing untruth, called upon the Highest to bear false witness for tithes and taxes, and upon that testimony the individual made peace with the verdict of his worthlessness. Being without soul, even the solace of salvation was denied the Samaritan and the Magdalene.

To the offal of the social order Christ brought the doctrine of the dignity of the individual. And what is the premise of this doctrine? That in the eternal scheme of things human existence is the only reality: therefore, in God's reckoning no person is beneath notice and esteem. "For the very hairs of your head are all numbered."

Nor did He leave that thought in a doctrinal vacuum, but He implemented it with a promise: the immediacy of the Kingdom of God -- on earth as it is in Heaven. "It is your Father's wish to give you the kingdom."

And of that kingdom, that social order which approximates our concept of the perfect, what must be, if we refer to the common hope for light, the rule of human relations? Is it not that justice shall have its turn, that the reign of legalized injustice by which man is robbed of his products and his self-esteem shall be no more? And that the inequalities which stem from this injustice shall disappear, for the first shall be last.

Is that reading revolution into the Christ-promise? Yet, not even the most ardent apologist for things as are dare put the Heaven-on-earth label on the world to which Christ came, or the one in which we live. Rather, to phrase the smallest detail of that ideal it is necessary to draw upon our imagination for its opposite.

"On earth as it is in Heaven." Whatever Heaven connotes to the theologian, to the layman it sublimates the highest aspiration of the human spirit -- which is Freedom. Can a Heaven which embraces slavery, economic or political, have any meaning? It is fantastic, blasphemous, if you will, to speak of Heaven-on-earth as a place where one man must pay another for the privilege of living. Surely, the Milky Way has not been reduced to private ownership, nor are the Elysian Fields pre-empted and for sale.

Then again, are the standards of eternal life fixed by monopoly exactions? Is there a tax on immortality? Do soul-bureaucrats hound the spirits into collectivized subjectivity? Or rather, do we not think of Heaven-on-earth as an existence wherein every man may do that which he will, provided he infringe not on the equal right of every other man?

He who brought this message of Justice and Freedom to a world from which Freedom and Justice had been banished by Avarice and Power was crucified. It is to man's everlasting sorrow and disgrace that the message itself all but died with Him. For not once during these nineteen centuries has man been free from poverty, from oppression, from war. Always the dignity of the person is whittled away by the ruthlessness of a self-seeking few, aided and abetted by the prevailing Pharisaism. Currently, it is the subtle soporific of the planned economy.

And yet, though privilege and its political satellites will do their utmost to emasculate the highest of moral values, to twist elemental truth into its opposite, to obscure light with planned ignorance, the human spirit cannot be forever stilled nor its hope forever denied. The spark that is Man cannot be extinguished. To those to whom the ways of Justice and the means of Freedom are known, the meaning of the Christ-promise is clear. And every day, from Christmas to Christmas, they rededicate themselves, because they cannot do otherwise, to the struggle for man's greatest ideal -- the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.