When he was asked _where_ men were to look for the kingdom, His answer was that they were to find a figure and parable of it in the normal process of nature’s scavengers. The carcass lies decaying in the sun, corrupting the air and tainting everything in its region. There can be no wholesome conditions of life in that spot until the corruption is removed. But nature has provided a way of cleansing the air. The scavenger comes and removes the refuse and corruption and turns it by a strange alchemy into living matter. Life feeds on the decaying refuse, raises it back into life, and cleanses the world by making even corruption minister to its own life processes. We could not live an hour in our world if it were not alive with a myriad variety of scavenging methods that burn up effete matter, transmute noxious forms into wholesome stuff, cleanse away the poisons, and transmute, not by an apocalypse, but by a process, death into life and corruption into sweetness. May not the vulture, like the tiny sparrow who cannot fall without divine regard, be a sign, a figure, a parable? When we look for the kingdom, in the light of this sign, we shall not search the clouds of heaven, we shall not consult “the number of the beast”—we shall look for it wherever we see life conquering death, wherever the white tents of love are pitched against the black tents of hate, wherever the living forces of goodness are battering down the strongholds of evil, wherever the sinner is being changed to a saint, wherever ancient survivals of instinct and custom are yielding to the sway of growing vision and insight and ideal. It is “slow and late” to come, this kingdom! So was life slow to come, while all that was to be “Whirl’d for a million æons thro’ the vast Waste dawn of multitudinous-eddying light.” So was man slow to come, while fantastic creatures were “tearing each other in the slime.” So was a spirit-governed Person slow to come, while men lived in lust and war and hate. But in God’s world at length the things that ought to come do come, and we may faintly guess by what we see that the kingdom, too, is coming. There is something like it now in some lives. IV “THE BEYOND IS WITHIN” Among the parables of Christ there is a very impressive one on the shut door. It is a story of ten country maidens who were invited to a wedding. They were to meet the bridegroom coming from a distance, as soon as his arrival should be announced, and with their lighted lamps they were to guide him and his attendants through the darkness to the home of the bride, where the banquet and the festal dance were to be held. For many days these simple maidens had been living in the thrilling expectation of the great event in which they were to take a leading part.