3. This silent coming of whatever shall prove great indeed, true in many regions of human activity, is truest of all in that highest region of all, where human and Divine must work together. " It is the glory of God to conceal a matter." If other momentous births " come not with observation," with pomp and circumstance and pride, challenging notice, noised abroad by the thousand tonoues of rumour and report, least of all does the Kingdom of God come with these.
^ I see how you are and what you feel : you want to have room to develop in, and quietness for the purpose. In this you are quite right. But you think that the requisite room has a local habitation if it could only be discovered ; and that quietness also is to be found somewhere or other. Let me use the language of Jesus : *' If any man shall say to you, Lo, here is Christ, or lo, there, go not after him. The kingdom of God is within you." It is most profoundly true : all development is from within, and for the most part is independent of outward circumstances.^
(1) Never did the Kingdom of God come among men in a manner so direct, so blessed, and yet so awful, as when He, the King of kings, the Infinite and Everlasting Being, deigned, in His
1 R. C. Trench, Sermms, 300.
*^ Life and Letters 0/ Mandell Creighton, i. 32€.
368 THE KINGDOM THAT IS WITHIN
unutterable love and condescension, to robe Himself with a human body and a human soul in the womb of a Virgin mother, and thus in human form to hold high court among the sons of men. Never did the King of heaven so come among us men as when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea. Compared with this stupendous event, the greatest catastrophes, the sublimest triumphs, the most critical epochs in the world's history, dwindle into insignificance ; " God manifest in the flesh " was a phenomenon the like of which had never yet been seen, and it must throw into the shade every other event in the annals of mankind. And what amount of public notice did it attract ? What were the thoughts and interests of the mass of men in Palestine on the day of the Nativity ? The last news from Eome, the seat of empire ; the sayings and doings of the able but capricious statesman who for a few years held in his hands the fate of the civilized world ; the last reports from the frontier, from the Ehine, from the Danube, from the Euphrates ; the state and prospects of trade in the Eastern Mediterranean ; the yield of the taxes in this province or that ; the misconduct of one provincial governor or of another : or matters more local than these — some phase of a long controversy between the soldiers and the civilians, between Roman officials and Jewish mobs, between this and that class of a subject population ; the rivalries, the efforts, the failures, the successes, the follies, the crimes, the misfortunes of a hundred contemporaries; — of these things men were thinking when our Lord was born. The common staple of human thought and human talk, sometimes embracing the wider interests of the race, more often concentrating itself upon the pettiest details of daily, private, and domestic life, was in those days what it is in these. On that wonderful night it was so even with the villagers of Bethlehem ; they could find no room for the Heavenly Visitor in the village hostelry ; they little heeded the manger grotto outside, where He, the Infinite in human Form, was laid along with the ox and the ass. Truly, then the Kingdom of God came "not with observation."
(2) It was so with the early establishment of the Kingdom, its first announcement and propagation. Twelve uneducated men possessed of little property, having few friends, obscure in social position, utterly destitute of all the usual means of extending their authority, or propagating their opinions — these twelve men, fisher-
ST. LUKE XVII. 20, 21 369
men, peasants, poor and powerless, commenced a controversy against the government, the power, the wealth, the learning, the philosophy of their own and every other country. What a conflict was this ! How unequally matched the combatants ! How un- equal in their numbers, how unequal in their circumstances, how unequal in their weapons! But these weak, defenceless, and personally insignificant men had in them a secret which was mighty to move the world. Wheresoever they went it went likewise, strange and silent. Everywhere they had the mastery, and yet there was no cry as of them that strive. Everywhere they had the mastery, yet the kings and kingdoms of the earth did not fall before them. All these stood visibly as before, but the unclean spirit was cast out of them.
Contrast this characteristic of Christ's Kingdom with what we find elsewhere. No one would say that the religion of Muhammad made its way in the world without observation. It burst upon civilization as the war-cry of an invading host : it was dictated at the point of the scimitar to conquered populations, as the alternative to ruin or death. The history of its propaga- tion throughout the eastern world was written in characters of blood and fire ; the frontier of its triumphs was precisely determined by the successes of its warriors ; and in these last centuries it has receded in a degree exactly corresponding to the progressive collapse of the barbarous forces to which it was indebted for its earlier expansion.