reign of righteousness on earth. It was only by degrees that they were driven through persecution to think of the heavenly state exclusively as the kingdom of God, and of this world as only a state of probation and expectancy, and of Christ as a Saviour not of the world but from the world. The more modern believers start from this later belief, making heaven their first aim, and, professedly at least, thinking this life of little value. Yet who can deny that they also have assiduously, even if inconsistently with their profession, served their own generation, and that much of the progress of modern times is to be traced to their efforts? We restore the primitive feeling under circumstances in which it is more possible for it to find its realisation. We teach men to hope for a reign of Christ in this world, that is, for the supreme influence of the Spirit of Christ in all departments of human life. But men pass. And what, to the mass of men who will never see it, is this kingdom of the Spirit of Christ on earth? In the first place, we shall see this kingdom advancing; we partake of its hopes even now, and that is in itself a great reward. It would be a noble and a Christian thing, even if there were no world to come, to devote our span of life to the benefit of those who are to come after us. We shall at least leave our hope to our children, and they will see what many of the best men of the past have longed to see and have not seen. But, in the second place, conceive, of this world as in itself the object of these hopes, and the destined field of the fulfilment of those purposes of God on which we have dwelt, but yet as a preparation for the higher and immortal state; conceive of earthly society as the commencement of and preparation for the heavenly, of present knowledge for future, of the sense of beauty here for a fuller beauty hereafter. In that case, the more complete the organisation of the Christian life here, the better preparation will it be for that which is to come. The colonist, who has been formed by the discipline of a civilised state, is not thereby unfitted for his new country. On the contrary, there is no faculty of his which has been trained on this side the water which he does not carry with him to his home beyond the seas. He leaves the outer fabric of his former life; but he has that within him which will build up a new one wherever he lands. We may best think of the world to come as it is set before us in the New Testament, where it is often impossible to say whether this world or the next is in the mind of the seer, the one continuing and sublimating the other, the two blended together in one redeemed state. The training, not of the individual only, is to be effected here. The societies of this world will, unless man ceases to be man, be reproduced in all except their narrow conditions and unworthy features, in the world to come. Thus the completion of the earthly Church may be the preparation for the fulness of the Church above. But the earthly is that in which duty lies, and on which our whole effort must be concentrated. Let us set ourselves heartily to the work of bringing in the kingdom of God on earth, in whatever department of it our lot is cast for in so doing we best ensure that, when these earthly conditions fail, when the walls of the flesh fall from about us, we, and those who with us form the kingdom of God on earth, shall form the kingdom of God in the new and better state, whatever it be, beyond the chasm of death. |