THE KINGDOM OF GOD. T HE place of a religion in
the spiritual scale is determined by its view of the universe as a whole,—its conception, that is to say, of man and the world, of God, and their mutual relations. Every religion has, implicitly or explicitly, a theory of the universe. Even fetichism, which attributes the energy of living spirit to material things, has within it the germ of a collective world view, but it is especially true of an historical religion that it is based on some great unifying principle in the light of which all things are viewed. Judaism, for example, rises out of the great idea of the oneness and moral sovereignty of God, and in proclaiming this principle, and thereby laying the foundations of a spiritual Theism, it has contributed to a permanent need of human thought. Bud- dhism, with its doctrine of self-sacrifice, of the abolition of the desire to lire, interprets life in terms of pessimism, and iu so doing does justice to many facts of experience, and commends itself to the best minds in the Oriental world. Such a teacher as Christ may be expected to supply a supreme formative idea, a framework, so to say, into which may be fitted all the strange contradictory phenomena of human life,—an idea which rims as a thread through the tangled story of our race, giving to this story spiritual meaning and dramatic unity. This idea He offers us in the phrase "the kingdom of God." The term was one of the ecclesiastical shibboleths of His day. He seized upon the idea, cleared it of all ignoble use, and made it the central theme of His Gospel.
Modern investigation has made clear to us what His con- temporaries understood by the phrase. It meant different things to different minds. The popular view conceived it to signify the visible reign of God in the person of His Messiah, who was to appear to end the oppressor's rule and make the Jew lord of the nations. The picture of the coming kingdom given in the Book of Enoch, an apocalyptic work of the second century B.C., coloured the popular expectation. It speaks of a Son of Man, an Elect One, who will come forth as a leader and prince of Israel against his foes. A great battle will be fought. The old Jerusalem will, as with the wave of a magician's wand, pass away, and a new and more glorious one will take its place. In the new Jerusalem pious Jews will dwell, and the heathen will do them homage. It was a hope like this that so fired Jewish fanaticism in its struggle against the legions of Rome that whole garrisons preferred suicide to surrender. Of course, the prophetic mind did not rest in such an external conception. It came to see that the triumph of Israel must mean the triumph of goodness. Hence the religious men, the better Pharisees, of Christ's day believed that if Israel could keep the law for only a single day, the Messiah would come on the clouds of heaven and the Day of Judgment would be ushered in, in which all pious men would be justified and the wicked put to shame. This, too, may have been the idea of the Baptist. He also came preaching the kingdom of heaven. For him it meant judgment, im- mediate and overwhelming. He likens the kingdom to an axe driven into the root of a barren tree and bringing it down to the earth; or to a fan with which the husbandman separates the chaff from the wheat, and the wheat is safely garnered in barns, while the chaff is burned up. Now, when Christ comes upon the scene the limitations which beset even the prophetic conception fall away. Indeed, the idea under- goes an absolute transformation. The king of the kingdom is not an avenger with a glittering sword in his hand, coming forth to despoil the nations and to strike terror into the hearts of men ; but He is the Father in heaven, who sends His rain upon the just and upon the unjust, and who wills the perfection of all, even as He is Himself perfect. And just because the king is the Universal Father, so all men every- where who are striving after the divine idea are members of the kingdom.
Christ's thought of the kingdom, which is so delicate and so difficult because so profound, may, perhaps, be best grasped if we recall that He does not regard the kingdom as the product of a vague future, but rather as a present state. He says, "The kingdom of heaven is within you or among you," and whether this means within the heart of the individual or latent in the community as the germ of a new social order, in either case it means that it is a present fact. All that the kingdom was yet to manifest itself to be was lying in germ in the soul of its Founder. Therefore, if we are to do justice to the thought which Christ would teach, we must keep in mind that, in spite of injustice, wrong, oppression, suffering— in spite of everything that seems to contradict our faith—the kingdom of God is a present fact. Since Christ's appearance on our planet, never again can the world be as though He had not been. It is true, indeed, that the present order of things, as it strikes the outward eye, is not the divine order. It is bard on the poor and the friendless. It has little regard for the weak and the dependent. Its word is, Might is right. And yet, within this order of things, there is another order,— the kingdom of God, which is slowly but surely transforming the natural order, and which will yet somehow and at some time prove victorious. A great modern divine of Germany believes that the truth which lies at the root of the doctrine of original sin is better expressed by the phrase "the kingdom of sin." This is a very interesting and suggestive thought. Here in this world, standing over against each other and in deadly conflict, are these two empires,—the empire of God and the empire of Evil. This means that neither sin nor goodness exists as an isolated, disconnected, and in- dependent fact, but rather as a complicated and organically related order of facts and tendencies. In spite of Weismann's doctrine, many scientific authorities agree in thinking that mental and scientific gifts are inherited. So too with moral and spiritual tendencies and attributes. They are handed down from father to son. Further, they are propagated, as it were, by contagion. Sin begets sin. Goodness creates goodness. Now, the truth that lies at the bottom of the idea of conversion is that every man by conscious choice belongs to one or other of these kingdoms.
The older individualism in religion had no room for the idea of the kingdom. At the present time we are everywhere witnessing a reaction against this individualism. Sociology is a science which to-day is studied with a passion that only theology could arouse at an earlier time. We now know that the various forms of social life, however they may have been perverted and degraded by sin and weakness, are yet elements in the kingdom, and have within them the seeds of a divine idea that will yet free itself of every accretion and perversion. The advent of God's kingdom, then, implies the advent of a new social order, in which the family, the household, the friendly circle, the State, the economic system, the fellowship of art, the republic of letters and of science, may be taken up into the service of the human brotherhood, and may be penetrated through and through with a sense of the service of God. Hence the kingdom is not only something rooted once and for all in human history; it is also something to be achieved, for it is the symbol of God's purpose, God's aim, which He permits us to take up and make the aim and purpose of our lives. Many interesting and difficult questions emerge at this point. For example, how are we to relate the idea of the Church to the idea of the kingdom P Sometimes of set purpose and design, and sometimes through mere confusion of thought, the Church and the kingdom are identified. This doctrine had its most famous exponent in Augustine. The Roman Catholic Church has taken over the theory, and views itself as the kingdom of God, and the Pope as the head of the kingdom. We must, however, distinguish between the Church of Rome and the Papacy. The Roman Church retains within itself many of the most beautiful and gracious spirits of the kingdom ; whereas the Papal Curia, with its iron rule, its intolerable autocratic spirit, stands as one of the greatest obstacles to the progress of the kingdom. Only the other day Papal officials excommunicated one of the moat pions and most spiritual of the Church's children. It stands opposed to freedom of thought and liberty of investigation, and that passion for truth which is the mark of the kingdom. No Church, however venerable or powerful, can wholly answer the high ideal of Christ. The kingdom includes the Church, as it includes science and hygiene and the State. The Church, like the State, exists for the kingdom. The function of the State is ethical. It advances the interests of the divine order by regulating the social relations of men, by determining their rights and their duties on the basis of the moral law. The function of the Church is to penetrate the State with a religious spirit, to view all questions and all problems, as it were, sub specie mternitatis, in the light of man's relation to God. The Church is the organ through which the great truths of God and of redemption, of the meaning and worth of Christ's person, are indicated to the world. Hence we may infer that the Church which most con- sistently witnesses to these truths, and thus best advances the interests of the kingdom, is the Church that has the promise of the future.
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