(1) In the doctrine of the kingdom of God, we have set before us the social aspect of Christ’s teaching; it reminds us of what we owe, not only to Him who is its King, but to those who are our fellow-subjects.  Of particular duties it is impossible to speak, though these, as we know, fill a large place in the teaching of Jesus.  But let us at least bring home to ourselves the thought of obligation, obligation involved in and springing out of our common relationship as members of the kingdom of God.  The obligation is writ large on every page of the New Testament—­in the Gospels, in the doctrine of the kingdom; in the Epistles, in the corresponding doctrine of the Church.  It can hardly be said too often, that, according to the New Testament ideal, there are no unattached Christians.  The apostles never conceive of religion as merely a private matter between the soul and God.  All true religion, as John Wesley used to say, is not solitary but social.  Its starting-point is the individual, but its goal is a kingdom.  Christ came to save men and women in order that through them He might build up a redeemed society in which the will of God should be done.  We do, indeed, often hear of Christians whose religion begins and ends with getting their own souls saved.  This simply means that so far as it is true they are not yet Christian.  To think only of oneself is to deny one of the first principles of the kingdom.  Wesley taught the early Methodists to sing—­

    “A charge to keep I have. 
      A God to glorify;
    A never-dying soul to save,
      And fit it for the sky;”

and some of his followers, both early and later, seem to have thought that this was the whole of the hymn; but the verse goes on without a full stop—­

    “To serve the present age,
      My calling to fulfil;
    O may it all my powers engage
      To do my Master’s will!”

And until we who profess and call ourselves Christians have learned this lesson of service, and have entered into Christ’s thought of the kingdom, with its interlacing network of obligations, we have still need that some one teach us again the rudiments of the first principles of the oracles of God.

(2) Again, the kingdom of God, Christ taught, is present; it is not of, but it is in, this world, set up in the midst of the existing order of things.  There are, it is true, passages in which Christ speaks of the kingdom as in the future, and to come.  Thus, e.g., He speaks of a time when men “shall come from the east and west, and from the north and south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God”; when “the righteous shall shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father”; when they shall “inherit the kingdom prepared for” them “from the foundation of the world”; and so forth.  But there is no real contradiction between this and what has been already said.  The kingdom is a growth, a movement working itself out in history, and therefore it may be said to be