[Footnote 106: Nothing can be more certain than that the _kingdom of God_ meant originally, and was understood to mean, a Messianic kingdom speedily to be revealed; and that to this idea of the _kingdom_ is due much of the effect which its preaching exercised on the imagination of the first generation of Christians. But nothing is more certain, also, than that while the end itself, the Messianic kingdom, was necessarily something intangible and future, the _way_ to the end, the doing the will of God by intently following the voice of the moral conscience, in those duties, above all, for which there was then in the world the most crying need,--the duties of humbleness, self-denial, pureness, justice, charity,--became from the very first in the teaching of Jesus something so ever-present and practical, and so associated with the essence of Jesus himself, that the _way_ to the kingdom grew inseparable, in thought, from the kingdom itself, and was bathed in the same light and charm. Then, after a time, as the vision of an approaching Messianic kingdom was dissipated, the idea of the perfect accomplishment on earth of the will of God had to take the room of it, and in its own realisation to place the ideal of the true kingdom of God.] [Footnote 107: II _Tim._, ii, 19; _Gal._, v, 22, 23.] On this foundation arose the Christian Church, and not on any foundation of speculative metaphysics. It was inevitable that the speculative metaphysics should come, but they were not the foundation. When they came, the danger of the Christian Church was that she should take them for the foundation. The people who were built on the real foundation, who were united in the joy of Christ's good news, naturally, as they came to know of one another's existence, as their relations with one another multiplied, as the sense of sympathy in the possession of a common treasure deepened,--naturally, I say, drew together in one body, with an organisation growing out of the needs of a growing body. It is quite clear that the more strongly Christians felt their common business in setting forward upon earth, through Christ's spirit, the kingdom of God, the more they would be drawn to coalesce into one society for this business, with the natural and true notion that the acting together in this way offers to men greater helps for reaching their aim, presents fewer distractions, and above all, supplies a more animating force of sympathy and mutual assurance, than the acting separately. Only the sense of differences greater than the sense of sympathy could defeat this tendency.