He contrasted this simple and overruling knowledge of God as the supreme
fact in a practical world with that vague and ineffective subject for
sentiment who had been the “God” of his Anglican days. Some theologian
once spoke of God as “the friend behind phenomena”; that Anglican deity
had been rather a vague flummery behind court and society, wealth,
“respectability,” and the comfortable life. And even while he had lived
in lipservice to that complaisant compromise, this true God had been
here, this God he now certainly professed, waiting for his allegiance,
waiting to take up the kingship of this distraught and bloodstained
earth. The finding of God is but the stripping of bandages from the
eyes. Seek and ye shall find....
He whispered four words very softly: “The Kingdom of God!”
He was quite sure he had that now, quite sure.
The Kingdom of God!
That now was the form into which all his life must fall. He recalled his
vision of the silver sphere and of ten thousand diverse minds about the
world all making their ways to the same one conclusion. Here at last was
a king and emperor for mankind for whom one need have neither contempt
nor resentment; here was an aim for which man might forge the steel
and wield the scalpel, write and paint and till and teach. Upon this
conception he must model all his life. Upon this basis he must found
friendships and co-operations. All the great religions, Christianity,
Islam, in the days of their power and honesty, had proclaimed the advent
of this kingdom of God. It had been their common inspiration. A religion
surrenders when it abandons the promise of its Millennium. He had
recovered that ancient and immortal hope. All men must achieve it, and
with their achievement the rule of God begins. He muttered his faith. It
made it more definite to put it into words and utter it. “It comes.
It surely comes. To-morrow I begin. I will do no work that goes not
Godward. Always now it shall be the truth as near as I can put it.
Always now it shall be the service of the commonweal as well as I can
do it. I will live for the ending of all false kingship and priestcraft,
for the eternal growth of the spirit of man....”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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