Christ has established it. His name is King of kings and Lord of lords.
He is Prince of all the kings of the earth. He is crowned with glory and
honour. By Him, that is to say, it becomes possible for men to serve God
with the energies of their will, and by Him it becomes possible for men
to take the pardon which God gives in Him. He founds the kingdom, and He
exercises the dominion. On an eternal relation and on an historical fact
that dominion of His is grounded,--on an eternal relation inasmuch as
He, the everlasting Word of God, has from the beginning been the Lord
and King of the world; on an historical fact inasmuch as that eternal
Word has been manifested on earth, and tasted death for every man.
Christ founds the kingdom, for He by His Incarnation and Sacrifice sets
forth the weightiest motives for service; He opens the path to return;
He brings God's forgiveness to men, and so shall rule over them for
ever--a King and Priest upon His throne: the Prince of all the kings of
the earth, both because He has from everlasting been the anointed King,
and because in time He has been, and will for ever be, the faithful and
true witness, and the first begotten from the dead. The foundation is
thus laid, the dominion established, the kingdom is come; but we are to
pray for its perfecting as the one hope of the world.
Then let us remember that we are thus guarded from the error that is
always rife, of looking for some new thing as the one deliverance for
earth. It is sad to mark how undying that tendency is. Age after age,
men have had the heartache of seeing hopes blasted, and fair schemes for
the regeneration of the world knocked to pieces about the ears of their
projectors, and yet they hope on. Every period, as every man, has its
times of credulity, its firm conviction that it has found the one thing
needful, and the shout of Eureka goes ever up. Alas, alas! time after
time the old experience is repeated, and the gratulations die down into
gloomy silence. Yet men hope on. What a strange testimony at once of the
futility of all the past attempts, and of the indestructible conviction
that men have of the certainty that the world will be better and
brighter some day, that undying expectation is! It is sorrowful and yet
ennobling to think of the persistency of the expectation, and the
disappointment of it.
God forbid that I should say a word to seem to disparage it! Not so. I
say the expectations are of God, and if men give them false shapes, and
scarcely understand them when they utter them, that does not in any
degree make the expectation less noble or less true. But what I wish to
urge is this, that the Christian attitude towards all such hopes should
not be unsympathising. Rather we are bound to say 'yes, it is so, and we
know how.' We are bound to proclaim that it is not any new thing that we
expect, but only the working out of the old. God be thanked that it is
not! The evils are not new, they have been from the beginning; and God
has surely not been so cruel to the world as to leave it till now in the
dark. Our hopes are not set on any new, untried remedy. This bridge
across the Infinite for us is not a frail plank on which no one has yet
walked, and which may crack and break when the timid foot of the first
passenger is on the centre, but it is a tried structure upon which ages
have walked.
Then if I have any hearers who are fancying that the gospel is worn out,
any who are glowing with the anticipation of great new things, who
scarcely know how, but believe that somehow, the ills that have in all
ages cursed humanity are to be exorcised by some new methods of social
organisation or the like--I pray them to ponder this prayer and to
receive its lesson. Do not say, you are but adding one more to the Babel
of opinions which confound us. Not so. We are not arguing for an
opinion, we are proclaiming a fact. We are not ventilating a nostrum, we
are preaching a divine revelation, a divine revealer. We are not setting
forth our notion of the evil, and our idea of what may be a remedy. We
are telling men God's word about both. We are preaching an old, old
truth: not man's opinion, but God's act; not man's device, but Christ's
power. We proclaim that the kingdom of God is nigh you, and while a
Babel, as you say, of private opinions, of passionate complaints, of
despairing cries afflicts the silence, one serene voice rises, 'Come
unto Me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden,' and after that sole
voice rings out the twofold choral anthem--of praise, 'Rejoice, O earth,
for thy King is come'; and of prayer, 'Thy kingdom come.'