to each other, helpfully and tenderly, along the marches and on every stricken field. This may not be practicable; it may not be good social economy, but as sure as God lives, it is Christianity! It is what the footsore, sighing Christ, as He walks to-day through the joyless alleys where men stifle, where women bear deformities for children, -this is what He looks for, and prays the Father to hasten; this is what, in the slow process of the centuries, He is bringing about. If we don't want it to be brought about, we ought in honesty to abjure Him and His teachings, and like the Gadarenes, beseech Him to depart out of our coasts. If we don't think a society built on the principles announced by Christ desirable or feasible, very well. Only let us remember that we have no right to reject Christ as a Master, Guide and Teacher, nay: as what He claims to be, a King, and yet keep Him as the object of what we are pleased to call our devotions.

That we may not do.

Neither have we

any right to talk of the Kingdom of Heaven as a far-off æsthetic fancy, or as a goodly

place in another world into which saints and children too fragile for earth are gathered, when Christ talked of it as a social order which it was His mission to establish on earth.

Jesus Christ was not the originator of a doctrine. He was not the author of a plan for the salvation of souls out of the world. He was not a personage of beautiful character who may become to pious individuals the object of a tender sentiment. Jesus Christ is a King. He did not compose a volume of valuable morality; He wrote never a line, save one in the sand. He founded a Kingdom. He began His career with a formal statement concerning the nature of that Kingdom. He told many parables beginning "The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto" this and that. He taught His disciples, and us, to pray for the coming of the Kingdom. He was tried for claiming to be a King. He affirmed before His judges that such He was. The inscription on His cross proclaimed Him a King, and the cross itself is the eternal symbol of the Law of Love, the Law of Sacrifice, which He, hav

ing perfectly fulfilled, commends to us as the rule of His Kingdom."

Christianity is not an individual matter. Jesus was not primarily a teacher of individual morality, neither did He know anything of individual salvation. He was a

Revealer of Social Ethics. His commands are not maxims of individual conduct; they are statements of great social truths. He did not spend His time telling men how they might save each his soul. He carried in His heart the vision of a redeemed and saved society, a universal Christian State, and every word He uttered, and every act He did, was in an effort to have that State, that Kingdom, realized in fact upon earth.

We cannot doubt that since He laid its foundation, the Kingdom has been slowly rising into view. But we cannot affirm that we have yet seen it in anything like its completion, nor that we have as yet any but the faintest notion of what it will be. We call our civilization "Christian" only in virtue of the promise which it gives of passing into the as yet almost undiscovered thing-Chris

tianity. Very little right have we to call ourselves by His name, we who still maintain a thousand institutions and practices directly opposed to His plain commands.

The race of men has yet to realize its kinship, its indestructible unity. Yet surely we can perceive the slow birth of a new perception of this. A race consciousness, a social mind, a common human spirit, is it not awakening to know, and to wonder at, itself? Are we not learning to see ourselves in each other, and to see ourselves in a larger life and consciousness of which we are parts? learning, each of us, that in our own interest, we cannot be indifferent to the fortunes of any brother-man ? that each of us must, in a measure, bear in our own flesh the sorrow of the world? that, as the Bishop of Durham exclaimed, 12 it is our own cause which is at stake there in the haunts of sin and misery, there also in the abodes of thoughtless luxury? that upon us every one is the burden of the essential, unescapable brotherhood, with its solemn responsibilities, and its yet magnificent inspiration ?

And can we doubt that as this sense of

our unity grows in us, the Kingdom will come? What will it be when it has come ? Probably it will never have come; it will be forever coming. But in its coming, it will do these things:

It will take command of the energy now spent in the effort on the part of many, ineffectual-to gain the mere means of subsistence, and it will direct it to fruitful ends, freeing all men during the larger part of each day, for profitable recreation, reading, and public service.

It will relieve those who are now obliged to accept disproportionate rewards for their services, the rich, from that necessity, and set them free from the thankless and worrying task of administering wealth, giving them opportunity for happier and truer living.

It will abolish sweating, slums and idleness. It will stimulate invention, and encourage honest work in crafts and arts.

It will level,-level up, to the best of us, -the classes; "exploited" and " exploit

" will become words of forgotten meaning. It will bring it about that no man to whom God has given capacity for knowledge