* It is curious, after writing the above, to find in a letter written by Foss Westcott, Bishop of Durham, to that pertinacious correspondent, the late Lady Victoria Welby, almost exactly the same sentiments I have here expressed.  “If I could fill the Crucifix with life as you do,” he says, “I would gladly look on it, but the fallen Head and the closed Eye exclude from my thought the idea of glorified humanity.  The Christ to whom we are led is One who ’hath been crucified,’ who hath passed the trial victoriously and borne the fruits to heaven.  I dare not then rest on this side of the glory.”

I find, too, a still more remarkable expression of the modern spirit in a tract, “The Call of the Kingdom,” by that very able and subtle, Anglican theologian, the Rev. W. Temple, who declares that under the vitalising stresses of the war we are winning “faith in Christ as an heroic leader.  We have thought of Him so much as meek and gentle that there is no ground in our picture of Him, for the vision which His disciple had of Him:  ’His head and His hair were white, as white wool, white as snow; and His eyes were as a flame of fire:  and His feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace; and His voice was as the voice of many waters.  And He had in His right hand seven stars; and out of His mouth proceeded a sharp two-edged sword; and His countenance was as the sun shineth in its strength.’”

These are both exceptional utterances, interesting as showing how clearly parallel are the tendencies within and without Christianity.

4.  The primary duties

Now it follows very directly from the conception of God as a finite intelligence of boundless courage and limitless possibilities of growth and victory, who has pitted himself against death, who stands close to our inmost beings ready to receive us and use us, to rescue us from the chagrins of egotism and take us into his immortal adventure, that we who have realised him and given ourselves joyfully to him, must needs be equally ready and willing to give our energies to the task we share with him, to do our utmost to increase knowledge, to increase order and clearness, to fight against indolence, waste, disorder, cruelty, vice, and every form of his and our enemy, death, first and chiefest in ourselves but also in all mankind, and to bring about the establishment of his real and visible kingdom throughout the world.

And that idea of God as the Invisible King of the whole world means not merely that God is to be made and declared the head of the world, but that the kingdom of God is to be present throughout the whole fabric of the world, that the Kingdom of God is to be in the teaching at the village school, in the planning of the railway siding of the market town, in the mixing of the mortar at the building of the workman’s house.  It means that ultimately no effigy of intrusive king or emperor is to disfigure our coins and stamps