less of such loss the better. The servant of God must keep his mind
as wide and sound and his motives as clean as he can, just as an
operating surgeon must keep his nerves and muscles as fit and his
hands as clean as he can. Neither may righteously evade exercise
and regular washing—of mind as of hands. An incessant watchfulness
of one’s self and one’s thoughts and the soundness of one’s
thoughts; cleanliness, clearness, a wariness against indolence and
prejudice, careful truth, habitual frankness, fitness and steadfast
work; these are the daily fundamental duties that every one who
truly comes to God will, as a matter of course, set before himself.
5. THE INCREASING KINGDOM
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 coordinated
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.
6. WHAT IS MY PLACE IN THE KINGDOM?
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.