vicious excess. It leads naturally to the saloon and brothel for men, to public dance hall and the vicious theater for young people. On the positive side students have recognized what Professor Patten calls the New Basis of Civilization in his volume by that name. Material goods of themselves can never produce the higher life of the spirit, but they supply a necessary condition. All the higher interests of man's life, art and science, religion and education, friendship and wholesome recreation, have an economic basis. There are great enterprises of the church and philanthropy and state which are waiting for material means in order to their execution. The prophetic vision is sound which includes in the coming day harvests and health, a nature more beautiful and more bounteous.

It is another question how this is to come, but upon that problem the past centuries have thrown a good deal of light. The answer is exactly the same as in the spiritual world. God gives his gifts not from without but through man's own activity. To fling gifts into idle hands is to curse and not to bless. If God's world brings any revelation of God, then he does not work that way. One can imagine the curse that would come upon men if the picture of Papias were true, and the new world should show such astounding fertility that men needed only to reach forth the hand in order abundantly to supply their wants. The highest type of human life has not come in the tropics, where men had not need of great toil to build shelter against the cold or provide against the winter, where nature's abundance made easy the problem of food. The new world of nature is not coming by some miraculous transforming force.

Step by step it comes through the activity of man and in three ways: (1) the mind of man by which he masters the laws of nature, and learns to rule her by working with her; (2) the industry of man in patient constant toil, that serves alike for moral training and for production; (3) the cooperation with fellow men, by which alone the greater tasks are wrought, the necessity of which again is a school for man's higher life.

It is hardly necessary to suggest the progress that the race has made in the making of a new earth. Great plagues which once decimated the race have been overcome, and the way of further advance has been made clear with such scourges as typhoid fever and tuberculosis. The last decades have shown a rapid advance in the knowledge of right living. The use of machinery and the application of power have multiplied tenfold man's power of production. We have literally changed deserts to gardens in areas far exceeding that indicated by Ezekiel. Two items, however, need to be clearly noted here:

1. Despite the progress made we are only in the beginnings. It is not the road we have left behind that is so important; it is the fact that we see so clearly the road ahead of us. We know that it will take time and patience and cooperation and juster principles in our economic order and a finer cooperation of men and nations as against the selfish scramble of the past. But we know the road. It will take all the forces of mankind, the men of science and invention and mechanical skill, the men of genius in business organization, the great directors of industry, the students of politics and economics, the statesmen of a new order both of mind and

character, and a spirit of brotherhood and cooperation and service on the part of all; and it will mean a long, long road. But there is no reason why any man should ask work in vain. There is no reason why he should not have leisure for home and friends and church and reading and recreation. There is no reason why each family should not have a real home with sunlight and fresh air and a real chance for privacy, why childhood should not have full opportunity to get ready for life and men and women a fair share of books and beauty and travel and life's other goods. There is no reason why the great diseases that afflict mankind should not be banished, or why the abnormal and defective should be born into the world.

2. This fairer, richer world of environment and opportunity will be conditioned at every step by the moralspiritual factor. The moral failure is the greatest obstacle to-day to the physical advance. Broadly speaking, that was the root of the whole tragedy of the World War, which in itself is but a phase of a far larger matter. The nineteenth century had made an unparalleled advance in natural science, in mechanical invention, in all that concerned the knowledge of the material world and its technical mastery. But the rate of growth in material wealth and power had far outdistanced the advance in moral resources and spiritual insight. Economic life had made swift increase in wealth and power and complexity, but we had not enough of either moral vision or strength to humanize this new industry and to make the new wealth a minister of justice instead of a servant of self-indulgence. Nations had grown great in territory and trade, but not great enough in spirit to

rule themselves and practice justice and brotherhood. And what was worse, men mistook the advance in wealth and natural science and technical skill for an advance in civilization.

It is a whole world that will be redeemed in the day of the kingdom of God, and to that end the service of all men and the utilization of all forces will be necessary. The man who works with his hands in actual production, the man who organizes and directs, the scientist and the inventor, the statesman and the student of social and economic problems-these are all needed. But the greatest service in the end is that of those who give vision and inspiration, who produce moral forces and train character. But when we have clearly recognized that the physical must be under the dominance of the spiritual, then we are ready to appreciate Browning's picture of the harmonious whole and to apply it beyond the individual to the new order of that day.

"Let us not always say,

'Spite of this flesh to-day

I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!'

As the bird wings and sings,

Let us cry, 'All good things

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul.'"

CHAPTER XI

THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD

THE kingdom of God, as we have seen, is the sway of the Spirit of God in the life of men. It reaches all the life of this world of ours, it is a rule over every force and every activity; but it is a control from within shaping all human life according to the spirit of love and righteousness which we know in Jesus Christ to be the Spirit of God. How, then, is this kingdom to come upon earth?

THE NATURE DETERMINES THE METHOD

Clearly, the nature of the kingdom determines the manner of its coming. And first, mere external force can have only a preparatory and incidental place. Such a provisional place force has, as we have seen. The realm of nature with its laws that operate by necessity is an important part of God's method with man. Here by stern tuition with much of toil and pain, man learns to observe, to reflect, to toil regularly, to look to the future, to control himself, to work with others. And just as man has found it necessary in human society, so with God there is a place for restraint and punishment, and even destruction. But the limitation of this method exists for God just as truly as for man, and that in the very nature of the case. The physical can produce only physical. The forest settler can clear the field with his ax, but the yellow harvest can come only from the life that is in the seed. Sheer strength will serve to pile