^ Arthur Symons, William BlaTce, 243. 2 phUlips Brooks.
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and claw"; that He would never have allowed sin to come in and leave its foul trail in the Garden of Eden, and in all the gardens of the earth. Such people fail to understand that when God peopled the earth with men made in His own image, these men were to be co-workers with Him in making the earth what it was in God's dream of it. God sketched a picture, but He intended man to fill in the details. There is nothing wrong with the sketch : God's work was " very good " ; it is the details that man should fill in that are botches and blotches on the pictures of God's conception. Is not this the teaching of the Lord's Prayer : " Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven " ? The doing of God's will is the co-working with God in the completion of His picture of an earth that is "very good," that is "as Eden the Garden of God." St. John, in his Patmos vision, saw prophetically an earth that was the earth God intended it should be when His design was completed. Some day the botches and blotches will all be removed ; all the stains of sin will be cleansed away ; all the disfigurements due to perverted human will shall give place to the beauty of God's perfect plan, and then indeed there will be " a new earth," and yet not entirely a new earth, for it will be just the old earth which God intended, but which has never yet been realized.
^ I find it written very distinctly that God loved the world, and that Christ is the light of it. What the much-used words, therefore, mean, I cannot tell. But this, I believe, they should mean. That there is, indeed, one world which is full of care, and desire, and hatred: a world of war, of which Christ is not the light, which indeed is without light, and has never heard the great " Let there be." Which is, therefore, in truth, as yet no world ; but chaos, on the face of which, moving, the Spirit of God yet causes men to hope that a world will come. The better one, they call it : perhaps they might, more wisely, call it the real one. Also, I hear them speak continually of going to it, rather than of its coming to them ; which, again, is strange, for in that prayer which they had straight from the lips of the Light of the world, and which He apparently thought sufficient prayer for them, there is not anything about going to another world; only something of another government coming into this; or rather, not another, but the only government, — that government which will constitute it a world indeed. New heavens and new earth. Earth, no more without form and void, but sown with fruit of
298 A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH
righteousness. Firmament, no more of passing cloud, but of cloud risen out of the crystal sea — cloud in which, as He was once received up, so He shall again come with power.^
7. St. John saw at once a new heaven and a new earth. The Scriptures are all against the unnatural separation of heaven and earth, which has been too common in vulgar thought and talk. The vulgar way of looking at it has been, earth here, heaven hereafter — which is quite unscriptural. Heaven is here to the Christian, and is, or may be, as real to him as earth. And as heaven is here as well as earth, earth will be hereafter as well as heaven. Listen to the Apostle : " And I saw a new heaven and a new earth." No Nirvana, no cloudland, no dreamland, no mere spirit country or cold expanse of mists for ghosts to float in, but a veritable homeland is there before us.
Tf It was round the thought of the Inner Mission that all his subsequent activities were built up. At a second conference in Nottingham, at the Jubilee of the Institute, in the last paper he wrote, indeed in all his addresses on modern church questions, he goes back to the Inner Mission as the corner-stone on which to build. Among its main principles are :
The kingdom of heaven Christ came to establish is not in the clouds, but here on earth. It exists wherever and whenever God's will is done upon earth as it is done in heaven. We have thought of the New Jerusalem as "stored up perhaps in heaven," like Plato's ideal city; but the apostle saw it "coming down from God out of heaven." There is to be a new earth, " wherein dwelleth righteousness," as well as a new heaven.
To establish this kingdom is the great business of the Church ; needing, like all human business, only in higher degree, ** rigorous method, indomitable persistency, and wise application of means to ends." Silver and gold may be wanting, but heart-service, pity, willing personal help — these things, which the Lord freely gives, men should freely give. And no redemptive impulse must be stifled, or allowed to remain unused. Each varied gift, what- ever it be, must be trained and used and disciplined " under wise and definite direction " in the work of the Church, which work is the establishing of the kingdom of God on earth.^