III.
The King's Eeign.
1. It is well that the Church should realize, in a way she is far from doing now, that the ascended Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords ; that He has established His Kingdom on the earth ; that He claims dominion over the whole human race, which He has redeemed by His blood; that the increasing purpose which through the ages runs, the one far-off divine event towards which all things are moving, and to which the complicated influ- ences of historical development are slowly leading the human race, is the establishment of the Kingdom of the King of Love and Truth in the hearts of men all over the world. Many a time Christianity has been tempted, and has yielded to the temptation, to lean on an arm of flesh, to grasp carnal weapons, instead of relying on spiritual weapons alone. The result has always been disastrous. Every such weapon has been found a boomerang. It is only by tenderness and love, by meekness and patience and sacrifice and martyrdom that its victories have been won, and these are its guarantee of the future. It is an inexhaustible source from which to obtain supplies. The indwelling spirit of its Master is the constant generative force to reproduce the conquer- ing power ; and it is bound to survive and triumph through its inherent power of an endless, an indissoluble, life.
^ If striving with all your might to mend what is evil, near you and around, you would fain look for a day when some Judge of all the Earth shall wholly do right, and the little hills rejoice on every side ; if, parting with the companions that have given
^ Nomian Macleau, C<m the World he Won for Christ 1 144.
REVELATION xi. 15 233
you all the best joy you had on Earth, you desh-e ever to meet their eyes again and clasp their hands, — where eyes shall no more be dim, nor hands fail ; — if, preparing yourselves to lie down be- neath the grass in silence and loneliness, seeing no more beauty, and feeling no more gladness — you would care for the promise to you of a time when you should see God's light again, and know the things you have longed to know, and walk in the peace of everlasting Love — then, the Hope of these things to you is religion, the Substance of them in your life is Faith. And in the power of them, it is promised to us, that the kingdom of this world shall yet become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ.^
2. In Tennyson's pathetic poem. In the Children's Hospital, a sceptic murmurs : " The good Lord Jesus has had His day," and the believing nurse makes the comment : " Had ? has it come ? It has only dawn'd. It will come by and by." " Only dawn'd ? " Why is Christianity, after all these centuries, only beginning to be manifested ? It is at least partly because of the apathy, the divisions, the evil lives of us who profess and call ourselves Christians ; because we have wrangled about the secondary and the comparatively unimportant and have neglected the weightier matters of the law ; because we have so left to those beyond the Church the duty of proclaiming and enforcing principles which our Lord and His Apostles put in the forefront of their teaching. We have narrowed the Kingdom of Christ, we have claimed too little for Him, we have forgotten that He has to do with the secular as well as with the spiritual, that He must be King of the nation as well as Head of the Church. But now, in the growing prominence of social questions, which so many fear as an evidence of the waning of religion, have we not an incentive to show that the social must be pervaded by the religious, that our duties to one another are no small part of the Kingdom of Christ ? For all sorts and conditions of men, for masters and servants, for rulers and ruled, for employers and employed, is there not ever accumulating proof that only as they bear themselves towards each other in the spirit of the New Testament can there be true harmony and mutual respect ; that only, in short, as the kingdom of this world becomes the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, will men in reality bear one another's burdens ; that only as the
1 Ruskin, The Bible oj Amiens, % 60 ( Works^ xxxiii. 174).
234 THE KINGDOM OF OUR LORD
Everlasting Gospel of the Everlasting Love prevails will all strife and contention, whether personal or political or ecclesiastical or national, come to an end ; that only as men enter into the fellow- ship of that Son of Man who came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many, will the glorious vision of old be fulfilled: "I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him : his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed."