Unknown will not be altogether hidden. . . .

But the business of such ordinary lives as ours is the setting up of
this earthly kingdom of God. That is the form into which our lives must
fall and our consciences adapt themselves.

Belief in God as the Invisible King brings with it almost necessarily a
conception of this coming kingdom of God on earth. Each believer as he
grasps this natural and immediate consequence of the faith that has come
into his life will form at the same time a Utopian conception of this
world changed in the direction of God's purpose. The vision will follow
the realisation of God's true nature and purpose as a necessary
second step. And he will begin to develop the latent citizen of this
world-state in himself. He will fall in with the idea of the world-wide
sanities of this new order being drawn over the warring outlines of the
present, and of men falling out of relationship with the old order and
into relationship with the new. Many men and women are already working
to-day at tasks that belong essentially to God's kingdom, tasks that
would be of the same essential nature if the world were now a theocracy;
for example, they are doing or sustaining scientific research or
education or creative art; they are making roads to bring men together,
they are doctors working for the world's health, they are building
homes, they are constructing machinery to save and increase the powers
of men. . . .

Such men and women need only to change their orientation as men will
change about at a work-table when the light that was coming in a little
while ago from the southern windows, begins presently to come in chiefly
from the west, to become open and confessed servants of God. This work
that they were doing for ambition, or the love of men or the love of
knowledge or what seemed the inherent impulse to the work itself, or for
money or honour or country or king, they will realise they are doing for
God and by the power of God. Self-transformation into a citizen of God's
kingdom and a new realisation of all earthly politics as no more than
the struggle to define and achieve the kingdom of God in the earth,
follow on, without any need for a fresh spiritual impulse, from the
moment when God and the believer meet and clasp one another.

This transfiguration of the world into a theocracy may seem a merely
fantastic idea to anyone who comes to it freshly without such general
theological preparation as the precedin