building homes, they are constructing machinery to save and increase

the powers of men. . . .
Such men and women need only to change their orientation as men will

change about at a work-table when the light that was coming in a
little while ago from the southern windows, begins presently to come

in chiefly from the west, to become open and confessed servants of
God. This work that they were doing for ambition, or the love of

men or the love of knowledge or what seemed the inherentimpulse to
the work itself, or for money or honour or country or king, they

will realise they are doing for God and by the power of God. Self-
transformation into a citizen of God's kingdom and a new realisation

of all earthlypolitics as no more than the struggle to define and
achieve the kingdom of God in the earth, follow on, without any need

for a fresh spiritualimpulse, from the moment when God and the
believer meet and clasp one another.

This transfiguration of the world into a theocracy may seem a merely
fantastic idea to anyone who comes to it freshly without such

general theologicalpreparation as the preceding pages have made.
But to anyone who has been at the pains to clear his mind even a

little from the obsession of existing but transitory things, it
ceases to be a mere suggestion and becomes more and more manifestly

the real future of mankind. From the phase of "so things should
be," the mind will pass very rapidly to the realisation that "so

things will be." Towards this the directive wills among men have
been drifting more and more steadily and perceptibly and with fewer

eddyings and retardations, for many centuries. The purpose of
mankind will not be always thus confused and fragmentary. This

dissemination of will-power is a phase. The age of the warring
tribes and kingdoms and empires that began a hundred centuries or so

ago, draws to its close. The kingdom of God on earth is not a
metaphor, not a mere spiritual state, not a dream, not an uncertain

project; it is the thing before us, it is the close and inevitable
destiny of mankind.

In a few score years the faith of the true God will be spreading
about the world. The few halting confessions of God that one hears

here and there to-day, like that little twittering of birds which
comes before the dawn, will have swollen to a choral unanimity. In

but a few centuries the whole world will be openly, confessedly,
preparing for the kingdom. In but a few centuries God will have led

us out of the dark forest of these present wars and confusions into
the open brotherhood of his rule.

6. WHAT IS MY PLACE IN THE KINGDOM?
This conception of the general life of mankind as a transformation

at thousands of points of the confused, egotistical, proprietary,
partisan, nationalist, life-wasting chaos of human life to-day into

the coherent development of the world kingdom of God, provides the
form into which everyone who comes to the knowledge of God will

naturally seek to fit his every thought and activity. The material
greeds, the avarice, fear, rivalries, and ignobleambitions of a

disordered world will be challenged and examined under one general
question: "What am I in the kingdom of God?"

It has already been suggested that there is a great and growing
number of occupations that belong already to God's kingdom,

research, teaching, creative art, creative administration,
cultivation, construction, maintenance, and the honest satisfaction

of honest practical human needs. For such people conversion to the
intimacy of God means at most a change in the spirit of their work,

a refreshed energy, a clearer understanding, a new zeal, a completer
disregard of gains and praises and promotion. Pay, honours, and the

like cease to be the inducement of effort. Service, and service
alone, is the criterion that the quickened conscience will

recognise.
Most of such people will find themselves in positions in which

service is mingled with activities of a baser sort, in which service
is a little warped and deflected by old traditions and usage, by

mercenary and commercial considerations, by some inherent or special
degradation of purpose. The spirit of God will not let the believer

rest until his life is readjusted and as far as possible freed from
the waste of these base diversions. For example a scientific

investigator, lit and inspired by great inquiries, may be hampered
by the conditions of his professorship or researchfellowship, which

exact an appearance of "practical" results. Or he may be obliged to
lecture or conduct classes. He may be able to give but half his

possible gift to the work of his real aptitude, and that at a
sacrifice of money and reputation among short-sighted but

influential contemporaries. Well, if he is by nature an
investigator he will know that the research is what God needs of

him. He cannot continue it at all if he leaves his position, and so
he must needs waste something of his gift to save the rest. But

should a poorer or a humbler post offer him better opportunity,
there lies his work for God. There one has a very common and simple

type of the problems that will arise in the lives of men when they
are lit by sudden realisation of the immediacy of God.

Akin to that case is the perplexity of any successful physician
between the increase of knowledge and the public welfare on the one

hand, and the lucrative possibilities of his practice among wealthy
people on the other. He belongs to a profession that is crippled by

a mediaeval code, a profession which was blind to the common
interest of the Public Health and regarded its members merely as

skilled practitioners employed to "cure" individual ailments. Very
slowly and tortuously do the methods of the profession adapt

themselves to the modern conception of an army of devoted men
working as a whole under God for the health of mankind as a whole,

broadening out from the frowsy den of the "leech," with its
crocodile and bottles and hieroglyphic prescriptions, to a skilled

and illuminating co-operation with those who deal with the food and
housing and economic life of the community.

And again quite parallel with these personal problems is the trouble
of the artist between the market and vulgar fame on the one hand and

his divineimpulse on the other.
The presence of God will be a continual light and help in every

decision that must be made by men and women in these more or less
vitiated, but still fundamentally useful and righteous, positions.

The trouble becomes more marked and more difficult in the case of a
man who is a manufacturer or a trader, the financier of business

enterprise or the proprietor of great estates. The world is in need
of manufactures and that goods should be distributed; land must be

administered and new economic possibilities developed. The drift of
things is in the direction of state ownership and control, but in a

great number of cases the state is not ripe for such undertakings,
it commands neither sufficient integrity nor sufficient ability, and

the proprietor of factory, store, credit or land, must continue in
possession, holding as a trustee for God and, so far as lies in his

power, preparing for his supersession by some more public
administration. Modern religion admits of no facile flights from

responsibility. It permits no headlongresort to the wilderness and
sterile virtue. It counts the recluse who fasts among scorpions in

a cave as no better than a deserter in hiding. It unhesitatingly
forbids any rich young man to sell all that he has and give to the

poor. Himself and all that he has must be alike dedicated to God.
The plain duty that will be understood by the proprietor of land and

of every sort of general need and service, so soon as he becomes
aware of God, is so to administer his possessions as to achieve the

maximum of possible efficiency, the most generousoutput, and the
least private profit. He may set aside a salary for his

maintenance; the rest he must deal with like a zealous public
official. And if he perceives that the affair could be better

administered by other hands than his own, then it is his business to
get it into those hands with the smallest delay and the least profit

to himself. . . .
The rights and wrongs of human equity are very different from right

and wrong in the sight of God. In the sight of God no landlord has
a RIGHT to his rent, no usurer has a RIGHT to his interest. A man

is not justified in drawing the profits from an advantageous