This mighty ideal has many aspects. It has been typified as the pearl of great price, for which all other possessions may well be sacrificed: in germ it is as leaven, or as growing seed. It will come sooner than is expected, though for a time longer there must be tares among the wheat: for a time longer there shall be last and first, and a striving to be greatest, and a laying up of earthly treasure, and wars and divisions; but only for a time,—the spirit of service is growing, and the childlike spirit will overcome:

“Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.”

When realised, it will conduce to universal love and brotherhood; it is the reign of Christ’s spirit in the hearts of all men; it is accordingly spoken of as the second Advent, and its herald song is still, Peace on earth, goodwill among men. Wherever perfect love and willing service exist, there already is the Kingdom.

We have to realise that the Will of God is to be done on earth, that the Kingdom of Heaven is to be a present Kingdom, here and now, not relegated indefinitely to the future. Our life is not in the future, but in the present, and it will always be in the present: it is in our life that we have to apply our beliefs, utilise our talents, and bring forth fruit. The Kingdom of Heaven is not only at hand, it is potentially in our midst, and may be actually within us. These are its two chief aspects, the social, and the individual. The ideal is to be made real, in each and in all: nothing is too good to be true: each soul is to attain its highest aim: the world is to be transfigured and transformed.

The above formula must not be supposed to exhaust the meaning of the great Phrase, which many parables have still only partially explained, but it is a part of its meaning. And the strange thing is that the world, with all its competition, wrestling and contending amid unheeded calls to order, is really working towards that goal. No other ending is possible in the long run, though it has been long delayed. It is the condition towards which the whole of humanity, each individual man, as well as the race, is blindly and unconsciously struggling;

The daily toil, in city office, in factory, in ship, in mine, in home, is really a struggle for Life, for freedom, for joy, for something wider and better than we at present know, for pleasures that satisfy and do not pall. We needs must love the highest when we see it, but as yet we do not see it: so we are working in the dark, and the best of us try hard to do our duty. The end is unrecognised, the means may be mistaken, but the energy is there; and the race as well as the individual is instinctively working out its destiny;—thwarting itself constantly by misdirected endeavour, yet constantly striving for self-development and enlargement, for progress and happiness. And this is true even when the main idea of enlargement is the amassing of money in unwieldy heaps, when happiness is sought in an exaltation of imagination by deleterious drugs, or when progress is thought to consist in the slaughter and impoverishment of opponents who might be our auxiliaries and allies.

If our vision could be cleared, and the aim of human effort could be changed, the earth would put on a new complexion; we should no longer be tempted to think of humanity as of an ancient and effete and played-out product of evolution,—we the latest-born and most youthful of all the creatures on the planet,—but should regard everything with the eye of hope, as of one new born, with senses quickened to perceive joys and beauties hitherto undreamt of.

That is the meaning of Regeneration or new birth: it must be like an awakening out of trance. At present we are as if subject to a dream illusion, in a slumber which we are unable to throw off. Revelation after revelation has come to us, but our senses are deadened and we will not hear, our hands are full of clay, we have no grasp for ideals, we are mistaking appearance for reality. But the time for awakening must be drawing nigh—the time when again it may be said: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.”

Meanwhile our seers depict man’s half-hoping half-despairing attitude, not so much as a striving, as a waiting:—the striving is obvious, but the unconscious waiting is what they detect—waiting as it were for the arrival of a new sense, a new perception of the value of life:—