Peace be to you.

When I was a boy, I used to go out to a farm during the summer, and I often noticed how chickens

used to pet one another.

At that time, I did not know the meaning of it.

Then just a few years ago, there appeared an article in Scientific America entitled

The Peck Order.

Some scientists, much more curious than I was, marked each chicken in the barnyard a little

bit differently so he could spot them.

And he noticed that there was a kind of a hierarchy and authority, a 400 among the chickens, and that

when they lined up to eat, say, chicken 25 that lived on the wrong side of the tracks,

would always be at the far end, the last one to be fed, or else stay at the end of the barnyard.

Then the chickens would begin to try and get into the 400.

And chicken 22 would peck 21 and if 21 ran away then 22 became 21 and this is now known in

scientific order as the peck order of chickens.

We know that it exists among human beings.

We peck at one another in the business world to try to get ahead, trample upon one another.

Monkeys do the same thing.

Monkey trainers will always watch a group of monkeys to discover which one is the leader.

Then they train the leader and all of the others follow.

I say that this driving for authority is both in the animal kingdom and in the human order,

but when the good Lord came to this earth, he did away with the peck order.

And he introduced an entirely new principle that the first should be last, and the most

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