n those who, having counted the
cost, are prepared to follow it if need be to the death. The surrender
Christ demanded was absolute. Every aspirant for membership must seek
_first_ the Kingdom of God. And in order to enforce the demand of
allegiance, or rather with an unconsciousness which contains the finest
evidence for its justice, He even assumed the title of King--a claim
which in other circumstances, and were these not the symbols of a higher
royalty, seems so strangely foreign to one who is meek and lowly in
heart.

But this imperious claim of a Kingdom upon its members is not peculiar
to Christianity. It is the law in all departments of Nature that every
organism must live for its Kingdom. And in defining living _for_ the
higher Kingdom as the condition of living in it, Christ enunciates a
principle which all Nature has prepared us to expect. Every province has
its peculiar exactions, every Kingdom levies upon its subjects the tax
of an exclusive obedience, and punishes disloyalty always with death. It
was the neglect of this principle--that every organism must live for its
Kingdom if it is to live in it--which first slowly depopulated the
spiritual world. The example of its Founder ceased to find imitators,
and the consecration of His early followers came to be regarded as a
superfluous enthusiasm. And it is this same misconception of the
fundamental principle of all Kingdoms that has deprived modern
Christianity of its vitality. The failure to regard the exclusive claims
of Christ as more than accidental, rhetorical, or ideal; the failure to
discern the essential difference between His Kingdom and all other
systems based on the lines of natural religion, and therefore merely
Organic; in a word, the general neglect of the claims of Christ as the
Founder of a new and higher Kingdom--these have taken the very heart
from the religion of Christ and left its evangel without power to
impress or bless the world. Until even religious men see the uniqueness
of Christ's society, until they acknowledge to the full extent its claim
to be nothing less than a new Kingdom, they will continue the hopeless
attempt to live for two Kingdoms at once. And hence the value of a more
explicit Classification. For probably the most of the difficulties of
trying to live the Christian life arise from attempting to half-live it.

As a merely verbal matter, this identification of the Spiritual World
with what are known to Science as Kingdo