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 world wide 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

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 world.

mission to the

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 interesting 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.

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

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ing has now become secondary; we are preaching the winning of the world for Christ, as we call it, but we place in the foreground the offer of an individual salvation which is to take effect in some other world than this, to reach which the Christian must first pass through the change called death. Now, this is so absolutely different from what the first followers of Jesus believed and taught that it is only by a long stretch of the imagination that present-day orthodox Christianity can fairly be regarded as Christianity at all. It would be easy to trace one by one how these changes in emphasis came about, but we must leave that phase of the subject alone and concentrate upon the task of showing what they are.

To begin with, then, we note that modern Christianity preaches an individualist salvation obtainable by believing something. Not only is this a drastic departure from the standpoint of Jesus, but it implies a point of view to which He was strongly opposed in the orthodoxy of His race and time. The issue declared in the sharp antagonism between Him and the Pharisees is one with which we are being confronted to-day, although we may not see it so clearly in our own case. It is truly astonishing to reflect that in these days the very thing against which Jesus strove so earnestly should have become entrenched in His own Church and be speaking in His name. It is somewhat startling to see how closely the conditions against which He vainly

strove correspond with those which prevail in Christendom at this moment. The reason why Jesus condemned the ideals of the Pharisees was not that they knew themselves to be wrong and were determined to throw dust in the eyes of the public, but because their whole idea of righteousness was based upon a false conception. It is always easier to fight an out and out scoundrel, who knows he is a scoundrel and means to keep on being one, than to resist and overcome a man who claims the sanction of the highest for something that is unreal and harmful. In the former case the issue is clear and unmistakable; in the latter it is not. This was just how Jesus was placed with regard to the Pharisees. These claimed to be the custodians of true religion, and they looked down upon all who were less earnest and thorough than themselves in their adherence to the traditional forms of religion. They were the Nonconformists of the hour in contrast to the State Churchmen, the aristocratic priestly order. They were opposed to the Sadducees and not without reason because they held that these were worldlyminded. They glorified the past of the party to which they themselves belonged, and were always insisting that this party had been the one hope of Israel ever since the great struggle for the maintenance of national religion against Antiochus Epiphanes and the Syro-Greek dominion in the second century B.C. At that time the Hellenising party among the priests had been quite willing to