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the Roman Empire and the establishment of an entirely new order with Jesus as its visible head. Rome could afford to be tolerant, as she was tolerant, of other faiths, but not of this. The rapid spread of Christianity meant the spread of opinions which, not without reason, were deemed equivalent to the subversion of constituted authority. The lower orders began to look to the fulfilment of the Christian ideal as their one hope of deliverance from their masters. Rome under the Antonines, as Gibbon has shown, had reached the highest point of external splendour and prosperity, but it was a greatness founded on a vast underlying discontent. Dr. Dill, in what is now the standard work on this same period, shows that with the increase of military rule the sufferings of the toilers become proportionately greater. Christianity came as a message of emancipation, and while its nascent enthusiasm lasted there was every prospect that Roman imperialism would have to set its house in order. There is nothing more dangerous to privilege and tyranny than a social gospel allied to religious fervour. Had the world been really ready for the Christian ideal of the Kingdom of God, the fall of imperialism would have been synchronous with the rise of a world-state in which the dream of present-day Socialism would have received fulfilment. But it was not to be. Christianity was conquered by becoming respectable. It did indeed mount the throne of the Cæsars, but only to replace secular by ecclesiastical

tyranny. The present Church of Rome is but the shadow of the old Empire; it is the Empire perpetuated under ecclesiastical forms. It is one of the great contradictions of history that the religion which started as the promise of universal brotherhood should have come to be the chief bulwark of authority and the foe of liberty. The transition was perfectly simple. All that had to be done was to transfer the expectation of communal happiness from this world to the next, and the thing was done. Henceforth the advice to the poor and oppressed would be that they should remain passive under existing injustice, in order that they might receive compensation in heaven. A greater travesty of the original meaning and purpose of the religion of Jesus could not well be imagined.

To sum up. We have now seen that the first followers of Jesus were Jewish nationalists, whose moral passion and social asSummary. pirations were more intense than those of their countrymen. They had somehow become convinced that their Master was still alive and would presently return to earth to complete the work He had begun, and they believed it to be their duty to publish this good news to the descendants of Abraham. But this simple ideal soon began to be mixed up with a theology derived from contemporary GræcoJewish notions about the origin of evil, the first and second Adam, and such-like. The root-conception in this theology, especially as it became

associated with the name of the Apostle Paul, was that the work of the Messiah when He returned to earth would be to break the spell which Satan had cast over the souls and bodies of men, that is, He was to "abolish death, and bring life and immortality to light." After the kingdom of Satan had been destroyed and the Kingdom of God established, none of the subjects of Jesus would ever again have to suffer or die. And just as Jesus was supposed to have risen from the dead, so would all the righteous who had died before His second coming rise again in order to take their place in the ideal Commonwealth. Before long this expectation was extended to Gentiles as well as Jews, principally through the exertions of the Apostle Paul. Henceforth the anticipated Commonwealth was thought of as worldwide and knowing no distinctions of race or nationality. Even the dominance of one sex over the other appears to have been thought of as having to go, for Paul says there was to be no question of male and female in the new order. But perhaps all that was meant was that there was to be no more marrying or bearing of children-a supposition which certainly alters the complexion of the statement. No economic theories were indulged in; all was religious enthusiasm. It was revolution by miracle, not by blood and barricades; although, according to the Book of Revelation, there must have been some vivid picturing of the dramatic nature of the final struggle, the Armageddon, in which the forces of hell would be routed and

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those of heaven prevail. Hence, while the Christians were persecuted for identifying existing political powers with the kingdom of Satan and prophesying their overthrow, they did not attempt to hasten this consummation by violence. All they did was to call for recruits to the side of Jesus and await His arrival.

It thus becomes evident that the hopes of the Christians were not at all dependent upon the theology which gradually developed in connection with them, and which occupies so large a place in New Testament writings. The allimportant thing in primitive Christian preaching was its intense belief in the coming of an ideal social order in which men would no longer feel any desire to strive against or injure one another. The superstitions about the dramatic second coming, the general resurrection, and the catastrophic nature of the changes which would then take place, need not deceive us in the least. The worst of it is that these over-beliefs have become substituted in the course of time for the original Christianity; the non-essential has crushed out the essential; other-worldism has gradually replaced the glad tidings of the Kingdom of God with which Jesus began His mission to the world.

CHAPTER V

THE KINGDOM OF GOD

III. IN PRESENT-DAY CHRISTIANITY

So far we have, I hope, succeeded in obtaining a fairly accurate general view of the situation out of which Christianity arose, together with the ideal implied in the new evangel. We have now to see how far Christianity as we know it to-day corresponds to this picture. In making our inquiry we have perforce to overleap the intervening centuries, and ignore vast and interestting developments which have had immense value and significance in the shaping of the complex civilisation with which we of the Western world are familiar. But there is no help for it; we have to narrow our field of observation if we would lay bare the main issue which we propose to examine.

The first thing, then, which strikes an impartial observer in reference to the question thus raised is the fact that modern Individualist Christianity has shed some of the salvation. illusions of apostolic teaching and substituted others. The next thing is that what was primary in Christian preaching has now become

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