* H. P. Liddon, Advent in St. Paul's, 118. ' W. L. Watkinson. Ashes of Roses, 268.
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beings whom it includes, and so far as they are under its influ- ence. It is, however, the former much more, and more frequently, than the latter. It is inward, spiritual, invisible, but ever struggling, as it were, towards outward expression and realisation ; hence it sometimes appears to be identified with such expression, however inadequate this may yet be. In the future, however, the outward and inward shall correspond. Perhaps what Jesus meant by the " kingdom of God " is best seen from the position He gives it in the Lord's Prayer. God's Kingdom begins when His " name is hallowed," with the turning of the heart in loyalty and devotion towards Him ; and is perfected when His " will is done, as in heaven so in earth." ^
The Kingdom of God or of Heaven was a religious conception which our Lord found in possession of the religious mind of Israel. We are just beginning to learn from a study of the Jewish apocalyptic literature of the first pre-Christian century how entirely our Lord accepted for His teaching the framework of religious ideas current among His own people in His own day. He is distinguished hardly at all from His contemporaries by the form of His teaching. But into the current forms He put a largeness and intensity of meaning which they had not known, which was destined in time to break through and transcend them. It was so exactly with this idea of the Kingdom of Heaven. For the mind of our Lord's contemporaries it was a somewhat confused medley of at least two conceptions which are really distinct. On the one hand it stood for the completion of the Divine purpose in the world of creation. The final destiny of man and of all created things was seen athwart a great cataclysmic judgment. An ultimate redemptive change would pass upon all things that grow here slowly towards their end, and transform them into the changeless reality which God had always meant for them, which God had always seen in them. The new heavens and the new earth would spring suddenly out of that great fire of judgment by which God would sift and try the world. And confusedly mingled with this conception was that of a slower and more gradual process by which this great change would be prepared. During this process, men, or at least an elect of mankind, would be conscious of a nearer presence of
* A. Stewart, in Expository Timet, iv. 467.
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God, of a closer presence of God's redemptive purpose in their affairs. This stage would be already an initiation of the Kingdom of God. It would be marked throughout by an experience of the constant urgency of His judgment, by a growing assurance of the working of His redemptive leaven in the human lump.
Now even here our Lord did not change the forms which He found. He did not seek to disentangle ideas which are at least logically distinct. He, too, sometimes spoke of that completion of human destiny, to be wrought through the sudden whirlwind of a final judgment, as near at hand, as already at the door, as coming within the lifetime of that generation. And again. He spoke of the Kingdom as growing slowly and secretly, as involving a kind of judgment which would leave it to life itself gradually to reveal the evil and the good, which would demand the greatest patience and tolerance lest the good be hindered or even destroyed by a too zealous haste to separate it from the evil. But whichever form He used He made it the vehicle of the definitive and perfect teaching about the nature of God's judgment. Eather, perhaps, if we may dare to speculate. He may have used both these contemporary religious conceptions because they insisted upon different aspects of the Divine judgment which are vitally united in its reality, though we can only think of them or realise them apart — its uncom- promisingness and its patience, its absolute character and its gradual process.^
^ The memory of this great idea is kept alive in Christendom by the Lord's Prayer, which has passed into universal use ; but the three Creeds, which are supposed to embody the essential features of the Christian religion, take no notice of it. The teaching of the Master appears to be the last thing that occurs to the minds of many Christians ; and if they can only pronounce some formula descriptive of His nature and person, they think it superfluous to dwell with loving reverence on the principles which He taught.2
2. The Kingdom, of God is at hand. — This may mean either that the Kingdom is imminent in the sense that it will soon be realised, or it may mean that the Kingdom has drawn near to ^ A. L. Lilloy. 'James Drummond, Via, Veritas, Vita, 123.
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men, is now in the midst of men, whether or no they recognise the fact of its present realisation.
The near approach of the Kingdom was what Jesus preached as His " good tidings " to the people, and veritable good tidings it would be to those who believed Him. It was like proclaiming the dawn of " the millennium." John the Baptist had already announced the nearness of God's Kingdom ; but it was in its judgment aspect that he proclaimed it ; Jesus emphasised its gracious aspect as the coming of salvation. We have no need to go to the later Apocalyptic conceptions for the foundation of this Gospel ; we find it in the Old Testament. The prophets had foretold the coming of this Kingdom in " the latter days." Isaiah had pictured it as a time of release to the captive, of justice and consolation to the poor and oppressed, a Jubilee year of " Divine acceptance " ; and Jesus declared that it had dawned upon them. " Daniel " had foretold how " the God of Heaven should set up a kingdom " which should never be destroyed, and had seen in vision the government committed to one who " came with the clouds of heaven, like unto a son of man " ; he had even given indications of the time when it should appear ; Jesus announced that " the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand."