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.

+Origin of the idea of the church.+—Where, then, did the idea of the church come from? It is as plain as anything can be that the primary interest of early Christianity was the kingdom of God. It took the conception over from Judaism with a deeper moral content derived from the preaching and the life of Jesus. Its first adherents did not even know that they had a new religion; they only thought they had found the true Messiah, although the Jewish nation as a whole had rejected Him. What they wanted above everything was to see the kingdom come upon earth, and we now know that they were mistaken in imagining that it would be established speedily and suddenly by the visible second coming of Jesus on the clouds of heaven. But seeing that they were thinking of it in this way, how did the church arise and why?

It is doubtful if Jesus ever used the word "church," for the two verses in Matthew in which He is credited with it are probably of late date and point to a time when the ecclesiastical organisation was fairly well established. Still the word itself has an interest and a history of its own apart from its Christian use. The ecclesia, as most of my readers may be aware, was the assembly of the citizens of any Greek city-state. It was the custom for the whole body of the members of a Greek self-governing community to be called together from time to time for the transaction of public business. This assembly was the final authority in matters affecting the communal welfare, and even after the various Greek states became absorbed in the Roman empire this custom was allowed to continue. It was the policy of the Romans to permit a large measure of self-government to their subjects of any alien race, and therefore the ecclesia of any particular city-state continued to be summoned as usual to decide upon matters of local importance. There is a reference to this in the nineteenth chapter of the Acts, where we read that the preaching of Christianity in Ephesus caused a riot which the town clerk—a thoroughly typical town clerk!—succeeded in allaying by reminding the demonstrators that if they had any real cause for complaint, the matter ought to come before the regular ecclesia. This properly constituted ecclesia to which the level-headed town clerk referred was the general assembly of the citizens for the transaction of public business.

It was quite natural that the primitive Christians should have come to adopt this word, and to an extent this very idea, as a convenient description of the new Christian community. After the departure of their Master the Christians held together, and wherever their missionaries went, new communities sprang up, animated by a spirit of loyalty to Jesus and a desire to realise His ideal for mankind. It was quite natural, too, that the apostles should recognise all these communities as being in reality one community for fellowship of faith and love; it was the ecclesia, or assembly, or society of Jesus, the beginning of the church of Christ, as it soon came to be called. There was no elaborate organisation; nothing could have been simpler. Every Christian seems to have thought that as it would not be long before the Master came again, the wise and right thing to do was for His followers to hold together and witness Him to the world, until that great event took place.

+Church only exists for the sake of the kingdom.+—But how far did Jesus foresee and intend this? It is difficult to say, but his choice of twelve apostles whom He carefully trained to continue His work is evidence that He contemplated the formation of some kind of society to give effect to His teaching. The number twelve points to the probability that He thought of this society as a kind of new Israel, a spiritual Israel, which should do for the world what the older Israel had failed to do, that is, bring about the kingdom of God. I have already pointed out that in my judgment Jesus did not believe, as His contemporaries did, that that kingdom could be established suddenly from without, but held that it could only be achieved by spiritual forces working from within. His ecclesia has lived and grown. It has survived for nineteen centuries, and is likely to survive for many centuries more. It has played a leading part in the making of modern civilisation. But it is no longer a unity, and many different theories exist as to its meaning and worth.

The sacerdotal theory.—Broadly speaking, however, there are two outstanding views as to the scope and function of the ecclesia, or church of Jesus. One is the sacerdotal, and the other is what, for want of a better name, I may term the evangelical. In outline the former is as follows: before Jesus finally withdrew His bodily presence from His disciples He formally constituted a religious society to represent Him on earth. This society was to be the ark of salvation, the "sphere of covenanted grace." Its principal work was to call men out of a lost and ruined world and secure for them a blessed immortality; those who were members of this church, and only they, were certain of heaven. Membership therein was clearly defined; the gateway was baptism. Those who were baptized in a proper way, even though they were unconscious infants, were members of the church of Christ and all others were outside. Within this sacred society souls were to be trained in rightness of living, and, to an extent, made fit for heaven. The Holy Spirit abiding in this society would sanctify the individual members and guide them into all the truth. It is even held that Jesus definitely appointed the way in which this church was to be governed. Its affairs were to be managed by a threefold order,—bishops, priests, and deacons. But here a division has taken place amongst the sacerdotalists themselves owing to the necessity of finding some final authority, some living voice, within this visible society to which appeal in the last resort could be made. Romanists have found this in the bishop of Rome whom they regard as the episcopal successor of the apostle Peter. Devout Anglicans take their stand upon the faith as defined by the first four general Councils, while in administrative matters they regard the bishop as independent. The Greek church also insists upon its autonomy.

This sacerdotal view has exercised enormous influence in Christian history, and I have sufficient of the historic imagination to be able to say that at certain times it has undoubtedly worked on the whole for good. But did Jesus really found a church of this kind? I am quite sure He never thought of such a thing, and historical criticism of Christian origins does not leave the sacerdotalist much to stand on. Jesus appointed neither bishop nor priest, and never ordained that any merely mechanical ceremony should be the means of admission to the Christian society or be necessary to the eternal welfare of anyone. In the early church the bishop or elder was the president of the little Christian society meeting in any particular locality. Primitive Christian organisation was anything but rigid and formal, and was as far as possible from the sacerdotal model. I do not say that the sacerdotal mode of organisation which gradually grew up was wholly mischievous, nor do I say that the primitive Christian organisation would be the best under all circumstances. All I maintain is that in founding His new society Jesus did not ordain any particular form of organisation.

+The evangelical theory.+—The other view of the meaning of the word "church" to which I have already referred, is that it is the totality of the followers of Jesus. Under this view organisation is a secondary matter. There are many reasons why Christian societies should organise themselves differently from one another. Temperament plays a great part in the matter. But theories of church government have ceased to be the burning questions that they once were. Most sensible men are now satisfied that forms of government matter much less than the kind of life which flourishes in the society itself.

+What the church exists for to-day.+—But what does the church exist for, using the word in its primitive sense? What ought it to exist for to-day? What is the justification for all the vast number of Christian organisations which exist throughout the world? This is a subject upon which a clear note needs to be sounded, for a great deal of mental confusion exists in regard to it. Two inconsistent views of the work of the church, as well as of the constitution of the church, have come down the ages together and exist side by side in the world to-day. The first is that the chief business of the church is to snatch men as brands from the burning and get them ready for a future heaven. The Fall theory has had much to do with this. The assumption behind it is, as we have seen, that the world is a City of Destruction, as Bunyan calls it. It is a ruined world, a world which has somehow baffled and disappointed God, a failure of a world which, when the cup of its iniquity is full, will be utterly destroyed as a general judgment. When that dreadful day comes it will be bad for all those who are outside the fellowship of Christ, for, like those who have died without availing themselves of the means of salvation, they will be relegated to everlasting torment in the world unseen. This view of the fate of the world as being at enmity with God, and of the duty of the church to persuade as many as possible to believe something or other in order to secure salvation in a future and better world, has been held by sacerdotalists and non-sacerdotalists, Catholics and Protestants alike. It is still implied in most of our preaching and in the hymns we sing. I admit that there is a certain truth in it, the truth that man is constituted for immortality and ought not to live as if this world were all that mattered. But on the whole, it has been thoroughly mischievous, and there is nothing which is acting as a greater hindrance to the spirituality and usefulness of the churches to-day. It is based on an entirely false idea as to the relation of God and the world.

+To save the world.+—But alongside of this view a far higher and nobler one has been present to the minds of Christians in every century, namely, that the work of the church is to save the world and to believe that it is worth the saving. If what I have already said be true, this is the idea which was in the mind of Jesus when He founded His ecclesia. To Him the purpose of the ecclesia was to help to realise the kingdom of God by preaching and living the fellowship of love. Ever since His day those who have been nearest to Him in spirit have been going forth into the dark places of the earth trying to win men to the realisation of the great ideal of a universal fellowship of love based on a common relationship to the God and Father of us all. This is what Augustine aimed at in his City of God. It was what Ambrose had in mind when he excommunicated the emperor Theodosius for having ordered a cruel massacre of some of his rebellious subjects. It was the ideal of the mighty Hildebrand, grim and arrogant though he was, when he compelled princes to bow their haughty necks and do justice to the weak. It was what Bernard of Clairvaux meant to declare when he defied the cruel and sensual king of France to approach the altar of Christ. Savonarola realised it for a brief moment in Florence, Calvin in Geneva, the Covenanters in Scotland, the Puritans in England, the Pilgrim Fathers in America. They all failed because the world can never be saved by the imposition of ideal institutions from without and by force; it can only be by the spirit of Christ working from within. But to some extent they all succeeded, too, for the world is a better place to live in because of the gradual and cumulative redemptive effort of the Christian ecclesia, the Church of Jesus. On the other side of the ledger we have to set many things that ecclesiasticism has done,—cruel persecutions, infamous tortures, burnings and massacres, devastating wars, and fierce religious hatreds. But these things have never belonged to Jesus; they are the very negation of His spirit. The true church of Christ in any and every age consists of those and those only who are trying like their Master to make the world better and gladder and worthier of God. The word "church" has become so hateful to many because of the admixture of other ideals with this that I sometimes wish something could be done either to get rid of it or to change it for another which shall fully and clearly express what Jesus really came to do. I maintain that the church has nothing whatever to do with preparing men for a world to come; the best way to prepare a man for the world beyond is to get him to live well and truly in this one. The church exists to make the world a kingdom of God, and to fill it with His love. No greater mistake could be made than to estimate the church of Jesus by ecclesiastical squabbles and divisions, or even by Psalm-singing and go-to-meeting talk. Look for the spirit of Jesus at work, and you have found the church too.

+Modern industrialism and the church.+—Judged by this standard where are the churches to-day? We have seen that the only gospel which Jesus had to preach was the gospel of the kingdom of God; everything He ever said can be included under that head. His Church, or Christian society, or whatever else we like to call it, has no meaning unless it exists for the realisation of the kingdom of God. We cannot state this too strongly. The whole of the other-worldism of the churches, the elaborate paraphernalia of doctrine and observance, is utterly useless and worse than useless unless it ministers to this end. Unless it can be shown that I am wrong in this supposition—and I think that will be pretty hard to do—a fairly good case could be made out for burning down most of the theological colleges in the land and sending the bright young fellows in them to do some serious work for the common good. For it must be confessed, as I said at the beginning, that the churches are to a large extent a failure. We cannot but recognise, for one thing, that our modern civilisation, with all its boasted advance on the past, is still un-Christian. It puts a premium upon selfishness. Modern industrialism is cruel and unjust and directly incites men to self-seeking. The weak and unfortunate have to go to the wall; little mercy is shown to the man who is not strong enough to fight his way and keep his footing in the struggle for existence. We are all the time making war upon one another,—man against man, business against business, class against class, nation against nation. We talk of our freedom, but no man is really free, and the great majority of us are slaves to some corporation, or capitalist, or condition of things, which renders the greater part of life a continuous anxiety lest health or means should fail and we should prove unequal to the demands made upon us. If a man goes under, his acquaintances will pity him for five minutes and then forget all about him. There is no help for it; they cannot do anything else, they have their own living to get. They are like soldiers in the heat of battle; they must not pause to mourn over a fallen comrade or they may soon be stretched beside him. I do not mean, of course, to make the foolish statement that present-day industrialism is unrestrainedly individualistic: thank God it is not that. But the principle of competition still exercises a sway so potent as to stamp modern social organisation as un-Christian. We may just as well recognise that fact and state it plainly. The glaringly unequal ownership of material wealth is anti-social; it is good neither for the rich man nor for the poor, for it is to the interest of every man that the body politic should be healthy and happy. That so large a number of our total population should have to exist upon the very margin of subsistence is a moral wrong. We have no business to have any slums, or sweating dens, or able-bodied unemployed, or paupers. Poverty, dulness of brain, and coarseness of habit are often found in close association. Some amount of material endowment is required even for the development of the intelligence and the training of the moral faculties. Wealth possesses no value in itself; it only possesses value as a means to more abundant life. If there is one thing upon which Christianity insists more than another, it is the duty of caring for the weak and sinful, but at present this duty is only recognised to a very limited extent.

+Christianity and Collectivism.+—In what I am now saying I am well aware that I have come to a phase of my subject which thousands of my countrymen are stating so clearly and forcibly as to compel attention; but what I want to show is that the present unideal condition of the civilised world is an indictment of the churches and their conventional doctrines. We seem to have forgotten our origin. I have long felt, as I suppose every Christian minister must feel, the antagonism between the Christian standard of conduct and that required in ordinary business life. There is no blinking the fact that the standard of Christ and the standard of the commercial world are not the same. Our work is to make them the same, and to that end we must destroy the social system which makes selfishness the rule and compels a man to act upon his lower motives, and we must put a better in its place. We must establish a social order wherein a man can be free to be his best, and to give his best to the community without crushing or destroying anyone else. In a word we want Collectivism in the place of competition; we want the kingdom of God. Charity is no remedy for our social ills and their moral outcome; the only remedy is a new social organisation on a Christian basis. I do not believe that any form of Collectivism, as a mere system superposed from without, can ever really make the world happy; it must be the expression of the spirit of brotherhood working from within. Neither do I feel much faith in any sudden and cataclysmic reformation of society. The history of Christendom proves that no institution can be much in advance of human nature and survive. Covenanters and Puritans found that out when they tried to make men godly by Act of Parliament; Savonarola found it out when the wild passions of the Florentines, restrained for a brief hour, broke their chains and destroyed him; the Christians of New Testament times found it out when their beautiful experiment of social brotherhood came to an end in the horror and darkness of the break-up of Jewish national life. But at least we can recognise the presence of the guiding Spirit of God in all our social concerns and work along with it for the realisation of the ideal of universal brotherhood. We can show men what Jesus really came to do, and, as His servants, we can help Him to do it. We can definitely recognise that the movement toward social regeneration is really and truly a spiritual movement, and that it must never be captured by materialism. I deplore the fact that, for the moment, the main current of the great Labour movement which, perhaps more than any other, represents the social application of the Christian ideal, should appear to be out of touch with organised religion. This cannot continue, for I observe that the men who lead it are men of moral passion, and often men of simple religious faith. It could hardly be otherwise. It seems to me in the nature of things impossible to sustain a belief in the moral ideal without some kind of belief in God, and assuredly God is with these men in the work they are doing and have yet to do. In fact, the Labour Party is itself a Church, in the sense in which that word was originally used, for it represents the getting-together of those who want to bring about the kingdom of God.

+The New Theology and Collectivism.+—The New Theology, as I understand it, is the theology of this movement, whether the movement knows it or not, for it is essentially the gospel of the kingdom of God. No lesser theology can consistently claim to be this; systems of belief which are weighted by dogmatic considerations have not and cannot have the same power of appeal. This higher, wider truth, which sweeps away the mischievous accretions which have made religion distasteful to the masses, is religious articulation of the movement toward an ideal social order. This fact ought to be realised and brought home to the consciousness of the earnest men who are labouring to redeem England and the world from the power of all that tortures and degrades humanity and stifles or destroys its best life.

This, then, is the mission of the New Theology. It is to brighten and keep burning the flame of the spiritual ideal in the midst of the mighty social movement which is now in progress. It is ours to see God in it and help mankind to see Him too. It is ours to show what the gospel really is and has been from the first. We shall not suffer the world any longer to believe that Christianity and dogma mean the same thing. Our business is to show that the religion of Jesus is primarily a gospel for this life and only secondarily for the life to come. We have to demonstrate that material things have spiritual meanings, and that wealth has value only as it ministers to soul power. We have to make clear to the world that the reason why we want to lift any man up and give him a chance of a better and happier life here is because he has an immortal destiny and must make a beginning somewhere if he is to reach the stature of the perfect man at last. We believe that faith is the one indispensable qualification for this work, as for any work that is worth the doing, or ever has been worth the doing, in the history of mankind. It is the victory that overcometh the world.