We, then, at the present moment are in the throes of a conflict from which we had no honourable means of escape. Not to have taken our place by the side of our Allies would have been to break our word, to violate our faith, to betray the righteous cause. We are doing, at the cost of awful sacrifice, our high duty; we have before us the noblest of purposes; we are fighting with hands that are clean, with consciences that are clear, and with hearts that are inspired by the courage of conviction. It is our fervent hope and our faithful belief that if, in spite of our wicked lack of preparation and our subsequent incredible follies, Heaven grants us a good victory, we shall use it to further the advance of humanity towards the goal of the Kingdom of God.
What that kingdom is we are shown in that matchless mosaic of utterances attributed to Christ, known as the Sermon on the Mount. It is the kingdom of righteousness, justice, love, and peace. When, however, we study the details of the polity of that kingdom, as they are set forth in the evangelical picture, we perceive (as the Church Universal has always perceived and taught) that they are capable of realization only in a Christian society cut off from the world, or in a world become dominantly Christian. To give to all who ask, to lend indiscriminately without expecting any return, would in society as at present constituted not only speedily reduce ourselves to destitution; it would also pauperize and demoralize those into whose hands our squandered wealth should pass. To take no thought for the morrow, and to refuse to lay up treasure on earth, would under existing economic conditions simply mean that we should become useless burdens upon a thrifty and prudent community. To ignore the legal and judicial institutions of our country by neither judging nor going to law in cases where wrong has been inflicted would be to foster the perpetration of crime in a world whose very propensity towards crime has necessitated the establishment of the courts. Similarly to decline to resist evil, where evil is rampant and aggressive, would be to play the part of a traitor and to surrender the world to the devil. The precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, however liberally they may be interpreted, are, in short, the negation of civil government; that is to say, they assume the existence of a community of sanctified persons among whom civil government is unnecessary. The irreducible minimum of civil government—as even the administrative nihilists of the school of Herbert Spencer admit—involves three things, viz., defence of life, protection of property, and enforcement of contract. With these three things the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount are, as they stand, incompatible.
All this is very obvious, and the consecrated common-sense of the Church in every age has clearly perceived it. The political science of the Apostles and the Early Fathers, and still more expressly that of their successors, recognized the authority of kings, the jurisdiction of courts, the justice of taxation, the rights of property, the majesty of human law, the protective function of soldiers, and the necessity of military service. All these were accepted as inevitable in society in its present state of imperfect development; although it was proclaimed that none of them would be required in the ideal Kingdom of God.
In the Sermon on the Mount itself, however, the truth as to the relativity of Christian institutions is obscured by the faith of the compiler that, when he wrote, the second advent of Christ was at hand, and that the Kingdom of Heaven was immediately to be established. For him there was no terrestrial future worthy of consideration; the reign of the Messiah had already begun; the consummation of all things was impending. Hence he did not feel it necessary, or indeed possible, to distinguish between the ideal of the perfect day and the practical policy of the actual moment. His citizenship already was in Heaven: to him present and future were one. The eschatological hopes of the evangelist were of course speedily dispelled, partly by mere lapse of time, partly by the growing wisdom and experience of the Church. The Church learned that its early expectation of the speedy and triumphant return of its Lord was ill-founded, and that its task was to convert the world to righteousness, not to preside over its immediate dissolution. Hence it accommodated its doctrines and its institutions to the changed outlook.
This fact causes no difficulty to those who believe in the progressiveness of revelation. Such as admit that New Testament ethics show an advance on those of the Old, will hardly contend that in politics any New Testament writer said the last word. What Tolstoy and his literalist school call the corruption and secularization of the Church was to no small degree a simple recognition of the facts that the Earth continued to exist, and that the Roman Empire and not the New Jerusalem was the dominant power therein. But though the Church as a whole was guided safely through the crisis of disillusionment, it nevertheless remains unfortunate that the compiler of the Sermon on the Mount should have made the false assumption. For the picture which he presents of the perfect man and the ideal society is so fascinating and magnificent that it is not marvellous that saints and visionaries, in a long and pathetic succession, should have repeated his error, should have ignored the distinction between present and future, should have assumed the actual existence of the Divine Kingdom towards which, as a matter of fact, mankind has still a weary and protracted pilgrimage to make; should have proclaimed the celestial anarchy, and should as a result have been overwhelmed in tragic or ludicrous disaster.
VI. THE PACIFICIST SUCCESSION
Those who have asserted the present applicability of the full detailed programme of the Sermon on the Mount, and have endeavoured to carry it into immediate effect, have been scanty in numbers, and obscure. A few early Christian communities, soon extinct; a few hermits isolated from their fellows; a few monks in secluded cloisters; a few friars repudiated by their own orders; a few small antinomian Protestant sects springing up and vanishing with gourd-like rapidity; a few groups of Slavonic dreamers forming the innocent extreme of the Nihilist fraternity—such have been the leading professors of Gospel Anarchy. One can, even while condemning them, respect them for their purity of purpose, their lofty idealism, their sincerity, and their consistency in following their false premiss to its logical conclusion.