It is doubtless for this reason that our Lord emphasises seeking His righteousness as well as His Kingdom. His Kingdom might be roughly defined as His power; righteousness as the right way of doing anything. But you never obtain power by going the wrong way to work; whereas by working in the right way you get your result. The conclusion is obvious.
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It is often objected to the point of view I have been trying to express that so much weight is thrown on material blessing. God gives spiritual rewards, it is contended, not material ones. To expect the material from Him is to make Him gross, and to become gross ourselves.
And yet those who put forth this objection are doing their utmost to secure material comforts, and to make material provision for the future. Are they doing it independently of God? Are they working in a medium into which God cannot enter? Is it argued for a single minute that "goods" are not God's good things, and that money is not their token? True, the love of money is the root of all evil. Of course—when you separate money from God, as Caucasians mostly do; not when you take money as one of the material symbols for God's love toward his sons.
As a matter of fact, we dig a gulf between the material and the spiritual which does not exist. We have seen that modern physical science is showing us how near to spirit matter comes, while it is highly probable that further research will diminish even the slight existing difference between them. Matter may really be considered as our sensuous misreading of the spiritual. That is to say, God sees one thing; our senses see another. In the wild lily cited by our Lord our senses see a thing exquisite in form and colour; and yet, relatively speaking, it is no more than a distortion of what God beholds and delights in. It is a commonplace fact that, even within the limitations of the senses, our sense-faculties perceive few things, if anything, quite accurately. Matter may therefore be considered as our wrong view of what God sees rightly. Both for Him and for us the object is there; but it is there with higher qualities than we can appreciate or understand.
The situation is not unknown among ourselves. A picture by a great master hangs on a wall. Two men look at it—the one with an expert knowledge of painting, the other with none. The untrained eye will translate into daubs of colour and meaningless forms what the skilled understanding will perceive as a masterly setting forth of beauty. So the good things—the "goods"—with which God blesses us, as well as the money which is their symbol, may be taken as having to God a meaning which they do not possess for us, but not as being outside the sphere of His interest and control.
XI
It is the tendency to puts "goods" and money outside the sphere of His interest and control which has impelled us—and perhaps the Caucasian especially—to have one God for the spiritual and another for the material. We try to serve God and Mammon to an extent far beyond anything we are generally aware of. It is not merely the individual who is doing it; it is part of our collective, social, and national life. Our civilisation is more or less based on the principle.
It is a mistake to suppose that a formal belief in One Almighty, All-knowing, All-loving God has, to the immense majority of us, ever been more than an ideal. It is a mistake to suppose that because the false god is no longer erected before us in silver or stone he is no longer served. The world has never outgrown idolatry, the so-called Christian world no more than any other. "Dear children," are the words with which St. John closes one of his epistles, "guard yourselves from idols." He at least did not think that the idol had been forsaken because the use of his name was given up.
We may define as a god any force to which we ascribe a supreme and controlling power in our lives. It is of little consequence whether or not we give it name and personality, so long as that force rules us. So long, too, as it wields a power which the One God does not, so long as we make the false god greater than the true, and more influential.