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 preceding 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, a refreshed energy, a clearer understanding, a new zeal, a completer disregard of gains and praises and promotion.  Pay, honours, and the like cease to be the inducement of effort.  Service, and service alone, is the criterion that the quickened conscience will recognise.