+Physical death of minor importance.+—It follows from what has now been said that all these familiar terms imply each other, and that death, judgment, heaven, and hell cannot properly be regarded as the "Last Things." They are all here now, here within the soul, just as infinity and eternity are here now. It is not a matter of hither and yonder, but of higher and lower. Physical death is not the all-important event which theologians have usually made it out to be; it is only a bend in the road. My own impression is that when we individually pass through this crisis, we shall find the change to be very slight. It will mean the dropping of the scales from the eyes, and that is about all. The things we have been living for on this side will only profit us in so far as they have gone to the building up of a Christlike character. If a man has been living for false and unworthy ideals, he will quickly find it out; the only possession he can take to the other side of death is what he is. Belief in the atoning merits and the finished work of a Saviour will not compensate for wasted opportunities and selfish deeds; these latter will light the fires of retribution as the soul awakes to its true condition, and then, and not till then perhaps, will the indwelling Christ obtain His opportunity. Nor will the absence of a formal creed shut any good man out of heaven; it is impossible to shut a man out from what he is. What we sow we reap, and we do so just because of what we fundamentally are. Every road to evil ends in a cul-de-sac. Sooner or later every soul will have to learn that it is no use kicking against the pricks; we must learn by the consequences of our mistakes that, being what we are, the children of the Highest, we cannot permanently rest in anything less than the love of God. Salvation and Atonement are just as operative on the other side of death as on this. The blind soul goes on for a while in its blundering selfishness, and the Christ spirit, the spirit of universal love, goes on seeking to win it to the truth. In the end the truth must prevail if only because we shall have to learn that the lie is not worth while.
+Evidence for immortality of the soul.+—No doubt there are some readers of these pages who profess themselves agnostic or indifferent with regard to the question of immortality, and I am not going to argue with them. It seems to me probable that before very long it will be impossible to deny it. The mass of evidence for the persistence of individual self-consciousness after death is increasing rapidly and is being subjected to the strictest scientific investigation. Men like Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge, men whose words are entitled to respect from the point of view of modern science, have publicly admitted the importance of such evidence; before long the scientific world in general will have to take it into consideration. But to me such evidence does not greatly matter, and I know very little about it at first hand. I build my belief in immortality on the conviction that the fundamental reality of the universe is consciousness, and that no consciousness can ever be extinguished, for it belongs to the whole and must be fulfilled in the whole. The one unthinkable supposition from this point of view is that any kind of being which has ever become aware of itself, that is, has ever contained a ray of the eternal consciousness, can perish.
CHAPTER XIII
THE CHURCH AND THE KINGDOM Of GOD
+Order of the subject.+—From the consideration of the true significance of such terms as Salvation, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell, we now turn to one which might be thought to occupy a relatively inferior position and to precede them in order of time. But if we have been right in holding that such terms as we have already examined represent states of the soul beginning here and now, we have considered them in their rightful place, for now we have to see how these states of the soul find expression in human institutions. In a word, I wish to devote some space to the consideration of the great subjects of the Church and the Kingdom of God in relation to one another. What is the Church? Where did the idea spring from? What had Jesus to do with it originally? What is the Kingdom of God, and how do the various Christian societies which call themselves churches stand in regard to it to-day? To answer any of these questions we must try to place ourselves to some extent in the intellectual and moral atmosphere of those amongst whom the ideas first arose. Let us take the Kingdom first.
+Origin of the idea of the Kingdom of God.+—At the time when Jesus came every person of Jewish nationality was looking for the establishment of what had come to be called the Kingdom of God. For many generations the Jews had been a subject race. There had been one brief period of national splendour and prosperity, namely, the reigns of David and Solomon. After generations were inclined to idealise these two reigns, especially the former, and to look upon them as a kind of golden age. David they looked upon as an ideal monarch; they called him a "man after God's own heart," and the imagination of poet and prophet loved to dwell upon his winsome personality. They thought of him as in a special way the king chosen by God, and the Israel of his time as a true kingdom of God, a kingdom of righteousness, peace, and plenty under the favour of the Most High. The real Israel of David's day was far different from this, but compared with the days that followed it was indeed a time of unexampled greatness. A similar tendency to idealise the past is observable in nearly every nation which has entered upon a period of suffering or misfortune, as we can see from the legends about King Olaf and Frederick Barbarossa. But Israel always looked upon herself as in a special way a theocratic kingdom, a chosen of God. At its best this idea was a fine one, one, it led to the thought of a special spiritual vocation for the sake of the other nations of the earth; at its worst it meant the assertion of national privilege and contempt for everything which was not Jewish. After the great captivity in Babylon the Jews were never without a foreign master, and the northern kingdom of Israel disappeared from history. But in quite a remarkable way Jewish poets and preachers united to keep alive the popular belief that God would yet "restore the kingdom to Israel." Hence there grew up a firmly held conviction that God would sometime raise up a prince born of David's line who with supernatural help, and with a strong hand, would drive out the invader and establish a kingdom which should outshine even that of David himself. This was the root idea of the kingdom of God, as we meet it in the New Testament, and as it is described in some of the most beautiful passages of the Old.
+The Messiah of Jewish expectation.+—As time went on this idea was deepened and clarified and became more and more associated in popular expectation with the advent of the Messianic deliverer whose work it should be to inaugurate it. At the time when Jesus was born this expectation had become very keen. Everyone was thinking of it, from Pharisees and Scribes downward. At the moment the foreign master was the Roman, whose rule, though milder than that of the Ptolemies, was quite severe enough; the people were impoverished and unhappy. What they were looking for was a Messiah, a transcendent but quite human personality of royal descent, who should expel the Roman eagles and inaugurate suddenly and completely an era of peace and prosperity the like of which had never been known before, a true kingdom of God. One extension of this idea was that Israel should replace the Roman empire as the suzerain of all the other nations of the earth. "Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall rise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising…. And the sons of strangers shall build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee: for in my wrath I smote thee, but in my favour have I had mercy on thee. Therefore thy gates shall be open continually; they shall not be shut day nor night; that men may bring unto thee forces of the Gentiles, and that their kings may be brought. For the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted…. The sons also of them that afflicted thee shall come bending unto thee; and all they that despised thee shall bow themselves down at the soles of thy feet; and they shall call thee, The city of the Lord, The Zion of the Holy One of Israel." This fine passage shows pretty clearly what was the general idea as to the nature of the anticipated kingdom of God. It meant that the Jewish Messiah was to take the place of Caesar and reign with undisputed sway from his capital of Jerusalem.
But we should do an injustice to the subject if we failed to allow for the fact that according to the prophetic ideal this kingdom was to be a blessing to the world, and to abolish all violence and oppression; the kingdom of God was to be a kingdom of universal peace and joy, a kingdom of righteousness based on social justice. It was because of this widespread expectation that the austere preacher, John the Baptist, obtained his hearing in the wilderness of Judea. All John had to preach about was the kingdom of God, which he declared to be near at hand. He believed that he had been sent to herald the coming of the Messiah, and from his words we can gather what people thought about the Messiah: "Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire." According to the Baptist, the Messiah would spare no kind of sham or hypocrisy; he would root out and utterly destroy every kind of social evil, no matter what. John insisted that it would be of no use for Jews to imagine that simply because they were descendants of Abraham they would escape this general visitation; hence his words to the Pharisees were particularly scathing: "O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" It is clear, therefore, that, in the opinion of the man who has now come to be regarded as the forerunner of Jesus, the kingdom of God was to be an earthly kingdom, was to come suddenly, and was to be inaugurated by a sort of general judgment or clean sweep of all the elements that made for oppression, cruelty, foul living, and pretentiousness of every kind. It had not the remotest reference to a world to come or a Divine Redeemer whose principal duty it should be to suffer and die in order to secure a blessed immortality for those who believed in Him.
+Jesus' idea of the kingdom.+—How far Jesus shared these ideas at the commencement of His own ministry it is impossible to say, but it seems clear that He was attracted by the moral earnestness of John and wished to associate Himself with those who were looking for a kingdom of God which should mean the establishment and realisation of the moral ideal in all human relations. But at the baptism a purpose long forming in his mind appears to have taken definite shape. He felt Himself called to preach the good news of a kingdom which could begin at once in the heart of any man who was willing to become the instrument of divine love and the expression of the ideal of human brotherhood. He went into the wilderness to think this out and then came back to teach it. I do not think He imagined that it could be realised quickly and easily, but it seems fairly obvious that at first He expected that men would be so glad to hear about it that they would hasten to avail themselves of it. All through His ministry He spoke of little else, and it was because of what He had to say about the nature of the kingdom that His followers were attracted to Him. Hence, too, we have the deathless teaching preserved for us in the synoptical gospels: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." The meaning of Jesus is perfectly clear and perfectly simple. It is that if a kingdom of universal brotherhood is ever to be realised on earth, it can only come by the operation of universal good will. This has been much too simple for most of the theologians, and so they have endeavoured to twist and torture it out of all recognition. As time went on, however, Jesus came to see that it would not be realised as quickly as even He had thought. Men could not or would not understand; they were looking for a kingdom which should mean plenty to eat and drink, and universal dominion for the sons of Abraham. Even His most immediate followers were unable to divest themselves of this notion, and it is plain enough that they went on hoping even to the end that Jesus would head a revolt and establish a kingdom in which they themselves would hold positions of dignity and importance: "Grant that we may sit, the one on thy right hand and the other on thy left in thy kingdom." The striking rebuke which Jesus administered to these pretensions, by setting a little child in the midst of the jealous men, will never be forgotten while the world lasts. Jesus did believe in an earthly kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy, but it is evident that He would have nothing to say to violence as a means of realising it. He even believed that the kingdom had already come in the heart of any man who was desirous of being at one with God and man and denied himself in the effort to do it: "And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you."
+Early Christian idea of the kingdom.+—An important fact, which I do not think is generally recognised, is that the first Christians thought almost precisely what the Jews did about the kingdom of God. Most people are accustomed to think of Christianity as having been from the first a religion which had principally to do with getting men ready for the next world. We can hardly think about it apart from ecclesiastical buildings, choirs, baptisms, confirmations, prayers for the sick and dying, and so on. So much have we been accustomed to think of it in this way that the average man reads his New Testament with these assumptions in the background of his mind. But this is certainly not New Testament Christianity. The apostles and their followers believed like the Jews in the sudden establishment of an ideal commonwealth upon earth. This was how they understood the Lord's prayer, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." They did not even wish to separate from Judaism, and it is clear from Paul's letters that there was at one time a great danger that the new faith might become a mere Jewish sect. The Christians differed from the Jews, not in their ideal concerning the kingdom, but in their greater moral intensity and enthusiasm, as well as in their profound conviction that the Lord Jesus was God's chosen instrument for realising this kingdom, and that He would presently return to earth and do it. Any unbiassed reader of the New Testament can see for himself that the primitive Christians lived in hourly expectation that this was what would happen. Of course they also believed in their Master's continual spiritual presence with them, but the dominant thought in their minds was that of a dramatic second coming and the inauguration of a reign of righteousness and universal peace, the making of a beautiful world, something like the Utopia of Mr. H. G. Wells. Nor was this altogether a delusion. If it had been, Christianity would soon have died. But, on the contrary, it lived and grew because of the great truth behind this belief, namely, that the Spirit of Christ working in the hearts of men is gradually producing this ideal kingdom in our midst. If, with this view of the character of early Christianity in our minds, we go afresh to the gospels or to the letters of Paul, we shall find it abundantly confirmed. There is no getting away from it. All the earnestness and enthusiasm of these first Christians were centred upon the belief in the near advent of a divine kingdom upon earth with Jesus as its head. This belief even affected the practice of these early Christians in regard to the disposal of their property. To understand this, let us put ourselves in their place and ask what we should do if we were possessed by the conviction that the whole existing social order might come to an end to-morrow morning or next week, and that after that no child of God would ever want for anything. I think we should be sure to feel that the holding of personal property would not matter much. If, in addition to this, our hearts were filled with a divine enthusiasm, an overmastering love for Jesus and for all our brethren, we should not want to keep anything back that could serve to make anyone happier for the short time that intervened before the glorious coming of the Lord. This was just how the primitive Christians felt. They had no organised economic system; no one was compelled to give anything, but under the pressure of the new spirit they willingly gave everything. What did it matter? they thought; they were only like pilgrims within sight of home, or watchers waiting for the morning.