Now of the more intimate and personal life of the believer it will be
more convenient to write a little later. Let us for the present pursue
the idea of this world-kingdom of God, to whose establishment he calls
us. This kingdom is to be a peaceful and co-ordinated activity of all
mankind upon certain divine ends. These, we conceive, are first,
the maintenance of the racial life; secondly, the exploration of the
external being of nature as it is and as it has been, that is to
say history and science; thirdly, that exploration of inherent human
possibility which is art; fourthly, that clarification of thought and
knowledge which is philosophy; and finally, the progressive enlargement
and development of the racial life under these lights, so that God may
work through a continually better body of humanity and through better
and better equipped minds, that he and our race may increase for ever,
working unendingly upon the development of the powers of life and the
mastery of the blind forces of matter throughout the deeps of space. He
sets out with us, we are persuaded, to conquer ourselves and our world
and the stars. And beyond the stars our eyes can as yet see nothing, our
imaginations reach and fail. Beyond the limits of our understanding is
the veiled Being of Fate, whose face is hidden from us. . . .
It may be that minds will presently appear among us of such a quality
that the face of that Unknown will not be altogether hidden. . . .
But the business of such ordinary lives as ours is the setting up of
this earthly kingdom of God. That is the form into which our lives must
fall and our consciences adapt themselves.
Belief in God as the Invisible King brings with it almost necessarily a
conception of this coming kingdom of God on earth. Each believer as he
grasps this natural and immediate consequence of the faith that has come
into his life will form at the same time a Utopian conception of this
world changed in the direction of God’s purpose. The vision will follow
the realisation of God’s true nature and purpose as a necessary
second step. And he will begin to develop the latent citizen of this
world-state in himself. He will fall in with the idea of the world-wide
sanities of this new order being drawn over the warring outlines of the
present, and of men falling out of relationship with the old order and
into relationship with the new. Many men and women are already working
to-day at tasks that belong essentially to God’s kingdom, tasks that
would be of the same essential nature if the world were now a theocracy;
for example, they are doing or sustaining scientific research or
education or creative art; they are making roads to bring men together,
they are doctors working for the world’s health, they are building
homes, they are constructing machinery to save and increase the powers
of men. . . .
Such men and women need only to change their orientation as men will
change about at a work-table when the light that was coming in a little
while ago from the southern windows, begins presently to come in chiefly
from the west, to become open and confessed servants of God. This work
that they were doing for ambition, or the love of men or the love of
knowledge or what seemed the inherent impulse to the work itself, or for
money or honour or country or king, they will realise they are doing for
God and by the power of God. Self-transformation into a citizen of God’s
kingdom and a new realisation of all earthly politics as no more than
the struggle to define and achieve the kingdom of God in the earth,
follow on, without any need for a fresh spiritual impulse, from the
moment when God and the believer meet and clasp one another.
This transfiguration of the world into a theocracy may seem a merely
fantastic idea to anyone who comes to it freshly without such general
theological preparation as the preceding pages have made. But to anyone
who has been at the pains to clear his mind even a little from the
obsession of existing but transitory things, it ceases to be a mere
suggestion and becomes more and more manifestly the real future of
mankind. From the phase of “so things should be,” the mind will pass
very rapidly to the realisation that “so things will be.” Towards this
the directive wills among men have been drifting more and more steadily
and perceptibly and with fewer eddyings and retardations, for many
centuries. The purpose of mankind will not be always thus confused and
fragmentary. This dissemination of will-power is a phase. The age of the
warring tribes and kingdoms and empires that began a hundred centuries
or so ago, draws to its close. The kingdom of God on earth is not a
metaphor, not a mere spiritual state, not a dream, not an uncertain
project; it is the thing before us, it is the close and inevitable
destiny of mankind.
In a few score years the faith of the true God will be spreading about
the world. The few halting confessions of God that one hears here and
there to-day, like that little twittering of birds which comes before
the dawn, will have swollen to a choral unanimity. In but a few
centuries the whole world will be openly, confessedly, preparing for
the kingdom. In but a few centuries God will have led us out of the dark
forest of these present wars and confusions into the open brotherhood of
his rule.