Let the gospel of Christ’s kingdom be preached in word and deed to all nations, let the love of Christ be brought to bear upon the great masses of mankind, and the time of the world’s salvation will be come. Its sin will be hated, forsaken, forgiven. Its social evils will be banished; its weapons of war turned to ploughshares and pruning hooks. Its scattered races and nations will be reunited in the obedience of faith, and formed into one Christian confederacy and commonwealth of the peoples, a peaceful kingdom of the Son of God’s love. FOOTNOTES: [131] Χαριζόμενοι ἐαυτοῖς, καθὼς καὶ ὁ Θεὸς ἐν Χριστῷ ἐχαρίσατο ὑμῖν. So in Col. ii. 13, iii. 13; Rom. viii. 32; 2 Cor. ii. 7, 10; Luke vii. 42, 43. [132] Comp. pp. 47, 83, 169, 189. [133] Vol. iv., pp. 22, 41 (Eng. Trans.). [134] Comte, vol. iv., p. 30. CHAPTER XXIII. _THE CHILDREN OF THE LIGHT._ “Be not ye therefore partakers with them; for ye were once darkness, but are now light in the Lord; walk as children of light (for the fruit of the light is in all goodness and righteousness and truth), proving what is well-pleasing unto the Lord; and have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather even reprove them. For the things which are done by them in secret it is a shame even to speak of; but all things when they are reproved are made manifest by the light: for everything that is made manifest is light. Wherefore He saith:-- ‘Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead; And the Christ shall shine upon thee.’” EPH. v. 7-14. The contrast between the Christian and heathen way of life is now, finally, to be set forth under St Paul’s familiar figure of _the light and the darkness_. He bids his Gentile readers not to be “joint-partakers with them”--with the sons of disobedience upon whom God’s wrath is coming (ver. 6)--for he has hailed them already, in chapter iii. 6, as “joint-partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” “Once” indeed they shared in the lot of the disobedient; but for them the darkness has past, and the true light now shineth.