There is also the objection to an insistence upon the will of God in
accomplishment in this world, that there is so much in the New Testament
which declares (and, as we have seen in the last paragraph, experience
seems largely to corroborate the view) that the Kingdom of God does not
come in this world but in the next. I refer (only I dislike using a word
which few soldiers at the front will understand) to New Testament
"apocalyptic," which seems to present a vision of this world as
immediately to pass away in catastrophe and of the arrival of another
order of things.
It is certainly very perplexing that there seems to be so little in the
New Testament outside of the Gospels which is plainly on all fours with
the first part of the Lord's Prayer. At the front the Lord's Prayer--as
the one island of religious ground, amid marshes of ignorance, common to
Englishmen--is the padres' great stand-by. It declares better than any
words which we can frame what distinguishes the Christian religion from
others--that it begins with and glories in what God is Whose Name is to be
hallowed, and Whose kingdom is in arrival and Whose will is in
accomplishment not only in heaven but _on earth_. But elsewhere in the New
Testament the _terrain_, as it were, of these wonderful happenings seems
to be changed, and to lie in the hereafter.
It is very hard to say anything simply and shortly about this.
At any rate it is no good blinking the fact that the New Testament
expectation of an immediate ending of this world was mistaken.[3]
Yet there remains the reasonable faith--surely burnt into us by the fires
of war, surely revealed to us in apocalyptic vision--that this world is
but a part of another, and that the other gives to this and to its
concerns their supreme importance.
We need to be two-eyed here. It is a one-eyed view to hold that because
this life is a pilgrimage to another and this world is passing away,
therefore nothing matters here and nothing is happening here. It is
equally one-eyed to shut out the goal whither we all journey, and to
concentrate on the affairs of this life as alone and sufficiently
important.
The whole view is that through the entire order--here and there--the will
of God is at work, and His Kingdom in arrival, but that their full result
and accomplishment lies beyond this world. Here are the partial and
unfinished stages, there the end whither they lead. To fall back on
metaphor, a city is in the building, a whole righteous social order--a
kingdom of souls. The building is going on now,--in Birmingham and
Bermondsey,--and that gives eternal importance to their perishing and
trivial affairs. What whole structure is being built, and how much of
Birmingham and Bermondsey can be built into it, is only partially known
now. It is partially known here, as days of testing and catastrophe break
in on periods of monotony, and lay bare their soul. But full knowledge
lies in the future--the great and final 'Day shall declare it.'