(2) The kingdom as a _gradual development_.--The inward gift prescribes the outward task. It is a power commanding the hearts of men and requiring for its realisation their response. It might be argued that this call to moral effort presented to the first Christians was not a summons to transform the present world, but to prepare themselves for the destiny that awaited them in the coming age.[30] It is true that watchfulness, patience, and readiness are among the great commands of the New Testament.[31] But admitting the importance of these requirements, they do not militate against the view that Christians were to work for the betterment of the world. Christ did not look upon the world as hopeless and beyond all power of reclaiming; nor did He regard His own or His disciples' ministry within it as without real and positive effects. While His contemporaries were expecting some mighty intervention that would suddenly bring the kingdom ready-made from heaven, He saw it growing up silently and secretly among men. He took his illustrations from organic life. Its progress was to be like the seed hidden in the earth, and growing day and night by its own inherent germinating force. The object of the parables of the sower, the tares, the mustard seed, the leaven, was to show that the crude catastrophic conception of the coming of the kingdom must give place to the deeper and worthier idea of growth--an idea in harmony with the entire economy of God's working in the world of nature. In the parable of the fruit-bearing earth Jesus shows His faith in the growth of the good, and hence in the adaptation of the truth to the human soul. In the parables of the leaven, the light, and salt Jesus illustrates the gradual power of truth to pervade, illumine, and purify the life of humanity. His method of bringing about this {138} good is the contagion of the good life. His motive is the sense of the need of men. And His goal is the establishment of the kingdom of love--a kingdom in which all the problems of ambition, wealth, and the relationships of the family, of the industrial sphere, and of the state, are to be transfigured and spiritualised.[32]