g pages have made. But to anyone
who has been at the pains to clear his mind even a little from the
obsession of existing but transitory things, it ceases to be a mere
suggestion and becomes more and more manifestly the real future of
mankind. From the phase of "so things should be," the mind will pass
very rapidly to the realisation that "so things will be." Towards this
the directive wills among men have been drifting more and more steadily
and perceptibly and with fewer eddyings and retardations, for many
centuries. The purpose of mankind will not be always thus confused and
fragmentary. This dissemination of will-power is a phase. The age of the
warring tribes and kingdoms and empires that began a hundred centuries
or so ago, draws to its close. The kingdom of God on earth is not a
metaphor, not a mere spiritual state, not a dream, not an uncertain
project; it is the thing before us, it is the close and inevitable
destiny of mankind.

In a few score years the faith of the true God will be spreading about
the world. The few halting confessions of God that one hears here and
there to-day, like that little twittering of birds which comes before
the dawn, will have swollen to a choral unanimity. In but a few
centuries the whole world will be openly, confessedly, preparing for
the kingdom. In but a few centuries God will have led us out of the dark
forest of these present wars and confusions into the open brotherhood of
his rule.

6. WHAT IS MY PLACE IN THE KINGDOM?

This conception of the general life of mankind as a transformation at
thousands of points of the confused, egotistical, proprietary, partisan,
nationalist, life-wasting chaos of human life to-day into the coherent
development of the world kingdom of God, provides the form into which
everyone who comes to the knowledge of God will naturally seek to fit
his every thought and activity. The material greeds, the avarice,
fear, rivalries, and ignoble ambitions of a disordered world will be
challenged and examined under one general question: "What am I in the
kingdom of God?"

It has already been suggested that there is a great and growing number
of occupations that belong already to God's kingdom, research, teaching,
creative art, creative administration, cultivation, construction,
maintenance, and the honest satisfaction of honest practical human
needs. For such people conversion to the intimacy of God means at most
a change in the spirit of their work