This conception of the general life of mankind as a transformation at
thousands of points of the confused, egotistical, proprietary, partisan,
nationalist, life-wasting chaos of human life to-day into the coherent
development of the world kingdom of God, provides the form into which
everyone who comes to the knowledge of God will naturally seek to fit
his every thought and activity. The material greeds, the avarice,
fear, rivalries, and ignoble ambitions of a disordered world will be
challenged and examined under one general question: “What am I in the
kingdom of God?”
It has already been suggested that there is a great and growing number
of occupations that belong already to God’s kingdom, research, teaching,
creative art, creative administration, cultivation, construction,
maintenance, and the honest satisfaction of honest practical human
needs. For such people conversion to the intimacy of God means at most
a change in the spirit of their work, a refreshed energy, a clearer
understanding, a new zeal, a completer disregard of gains and praises
and promotion. Pay, honours, and the like cease to be the inducement of
effort. Service, and service alone, is the criterion that the quickened
conscience will recognise.
Most of such people will find themselves in positions in which service
is mingled with activities of a baser sort, in which service is a little
warped and deflected by old traditions and usage, by mercenary and
commercial considerations, by some inherent or special degradation of
purpose. The spirit of God will not let the believer rest until his life
is readjusted and as far as possible freed from the waste of these base
diversions. For example a scientific investigator, lit and inspired by
great inquiries, may be hampered by the conditions of his professorship
or research fellowship, which exact an appearance of “practical”
results. Or he may be obliged to lecture or conduct classes. He may
be able to give but half his possible gift to the work of his real
aptitude, and that at a sacrifice of money and reputation among
short-sighted but influential contemporaries. Well, if he is by nature
an investigator he will know that the research is what God needs of him.
He cannot continue it at all if he leaves his position, and so he must
needs waste something of his gift to save the rest. But should a poorer
or a humbler post offer him better opportunity, there lies his work for
God. There one has a very common and simple type of the problems that
will arise in the lives of men when they are lit by sudden realisation
of the immediacy of God.
Akin to that case is the perplexity of any successful physician between
the increase of knowledge and the public welfare on the one hand, and
the lucrative possibilities of his practice among wealthy people on the
other. He belongs to a profession that is crippled by a mediaeval code,
a profession which was blind to the common interest of the Public Health
and regarded its members merely as skilled practitioners employed to
“cure” individual ailments. Very slowly and tortuously do the methods of
the profession adapt themselves to the modern conception of an army of
devoted men working as a whole under God for the health of mankind as
a whole, broadening out from the frowsy den of the “leech,” with its
crocodile and bottles and hieroglyphic prescriptions, to a skilled and
illuminating co-operation with those who deal with the food and housing
and economic life of the community.
And again quite parallel with these personal problems is the trouble of
the artist between the market and vulgar fame on the one hand and his
divine impulse on the other.
The presence of God will be a continual light and help in every decision
that must be made by men and women in these more or less vitiated, but
still fundamentally useful and righteous, positions.
The trouble becomes more marked and more difficult in the case of a man
who is a manufacturer or a trader, the financier of business enterprise
or the proprietor of great estates. The world is in need of manufactures
and that goods should be distributed; land must be administered and
new economic possibilities developed. The drift of things is in the
direction of state ownership and control, but in a great number of
cases the state is not ripe for such undertakings, it commands neither
sufficient integrity nor sufficient ability, and the proprietor of
factory, store, credit or land, must continue in possession, holding as
a trustee for God and, so far as lies in his power, preparing for his
supersession by some more public administration. Modern religion admits
of no facile flights from responsibility. It permits no headlong resort
to the wilderness and sterile virtue. It counts the recluse who fasts
among scorpions in a cave as no better than a deserter in hiding. It
unhesitatingly forbids any rich young man to sell all that he has and
give to the poor. Himself and all that he has must be alike dedicated to
God.
The plain duty that will be understood by the proprietor of land and of
every sort of general need and service, so soon as he becomes aware of
God, is so to administer his possessions as to achieve the maximum of
possible efficiency, the most generous output, and the least private
profit. He may set aside a salary for his maintenance; the rest he must
deal with like a zealous public official. And if he perceives that the
affair could be better administered by other hands than his own, then it
is his business to get it into those hands with the smallest delay and
the least profit to himself. . . .
The rights and wrongs of human equity are very different from right and
wrong in the sight of God. In the sight of God no landlord has a
RIGHT to his rent, no usurer has a RIGHT to his interest. A man is not
justified in drawing the profits from an advantageous agreement nor free
to spend the profits of a speculation as he will. God takes no heed of
savings nor of abstinence. He recognises no right to the “rewards of
abstinence,” no right to any rewards. Those profits and comforts and
consolations are the inducements that dangle before the eyes of the
spiritually blind. Wealth is an embarrassment to the religious, for God
calls them to account for it. The servant of God has no business with
wealth or power except to use them immediately in the service of God.
Finding these things in his hands he is bound to administer them in the
service of God.
The tendency of modern religion goes far beyond the alleged communism
of the early Christians, and far beyond the tithes of the scribes and
Pharisees. God takes all. He takes you, blood and bones and house and
acres, he takes skill and influence and expectations. For all the rest
of your life you are nothing but God’s agent. If you are not prepared
for so complete a surrender, then you are infinitely remote from God.
You must go your way. Here you are merely a curious interloper. Perhaps
you have been desiring God as an experience, or coveting him as
a possession. You have not begun to understand. This that we are
discussing in this book is as yet nothing for you.