"Many thinkers," said the preacher, in his concluding passage, while all eyes were fixed on the head sprinkled with gray, and the strong humanity of the face--"many men, in all ages and civilizations have dreamed of a City of God, a Kingdom of Righteousness, an Ideal State, and a Divine Ruler. Jesus alone has made of that dream, history; has forced it upon, and stamped it into history. The Messianic dream of Judaism--though wrought of nobler tissue--it's not unlike similar dreams in other religions; but in this it is unique, that it gave Jesus of Nazareth his opportunity, and that from it has sprung the Christian Church. Jesus accepted it with the heart of a child; he lived in it; he died for it; and by means of it, his spiritual genius, his faithfulness unto death transformed a world. He died indeed, overwhelmed; with the pathetic cry of utter defeat upon his lips. And the leading races of mankind have knelt ever since to the mighty spirit who dared not only to conceive and found the Kingdom of God, but to think of himself as its Spiritual King--by sheer divine right of service, of suffering, and of death! Only through tribulation and woe--through the _peirasmos_ or sore trial of the world--according to Messianic belief, could the Kingdom be realized, and Messiah revealed. It was the marvellous conception of Jesus, inspired by the ancient poetry and prophecy of his nation, that he might, as the Suffering Servant, concentrate in himself the suffering due from his race, and from the world, and by his death bring about--violently, "by force"--the outpouring of the Spirit, the Resurrection, and the dawn of the heavenly Kingdom. He went up to Jerusalem to die; he provoked his death; he died. And from the Resurrection visions which followed naturally on such a life and death, inspired by such conceptions, and breathing them with such power into the souls of other men, arose the Christian Church. "The Parousia for which the Lord had looked, delayed. It delays still. The scope and details of the Messianic dream itself mean nothing to us any more. "But its spirit is immortal. The vision of a kingdom of Heaven--a polity of the soul, within, or superseding the earthly polity--once interfused with man's thought and life, has proved to be imperishable, a thing that cannot die. "Only it must be realized afresh from age to age; embodied afresh in the conceptions and the language of successive generations. "And these developing embodiments and epiphanies of the kingdom can only be brought into being by the method of Christ--that is to say, by '_violence_'. "Again and again has the kingdom 'suffered violence'--has been brought fragmentarily into the world '_by force_'--by the only irresistible force--that of suffering, of love, of self-renouncing faith. "To that 'force' we, as religious Reformers, appeal.