, then I challenge you to
get any kind of meaning out of them whatever. But if by the
Kingdom of Heaven is meant (as it is clear from other parts of
Christ's teaching is the case) the righteous society to be
established upon earth, then they all have a plain and
beautiful meaning; a meaning well summed up in that saying so
often quoted against us by the sceptic and the atheist, 'Seek
ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all
these things shall be added unto you;' or, in other words,
'Live,' Christ said, 'all of you together, not each of you by
himself; live as members of the righteous society which I have
come to found upon earth, and then you will be clothed as
beautifully as the Eastern lily and fed as surely as the
birds.'"

And the Rev. R. J. Campbell, who comes to Socialism by way of
Nonconformity, is equally convincing in support of this assertion that
the "Kingdom of Heaven" was and is a terrestrial ideal.

This is not simply the Christian ideal of society, it is the ideal of
every right-thinking man, of every man with a full sense of beauty.
You will find it rendered in two imperishably beautiful Utopias of our
own time, both, I glory to write, by Englishmen, the _News from
Nowhere_ of William Morris, and Hudson's exquisite _Crystal Age_. Both
these present practically Anarchist States, both assume idealized
human beings, beings finer, simpler, nobler than the heated, limited
and striving poor souls who thrust and suffer among the stresses of
this present life. And the present writer, too--I must mention him
here to guard against a confusion in the future--when a little while
ago he imagined humanity exalted morally and intellectually by the
brush of a comet's tail,[20] was forced by the logic of his premises
and even against his first intention to present not a Socialist State
but a glorious anarchism as the outcome of that rejuvenescence of the
world.

[20] _In the Days of the Comet._ (Macmillan & Co., 1906.)
Anti-Socialist speakers and writers are in the habit of
quoting passages of a review from the _Times Literary
Supplement_, published during the heat of the "Book War,"
and promptly controverted, as though they were quotations
from this book.

But the business of Socialism lies at a lower level and concerns
immediate things; our material is the world as it is, full of unjust
laws, bad trad