God forbid that I should say a word to seem to disparage it!  Not so.  I say the expectations are of God, and if men give them false shapes, and scarcely understand them when they utter them, that does not in any degree make the expectation less noble or less true.  But what I wish to urge is this, that the Christian attitude towards all such hopes should not be unsympathising.  Rather we are bound to say ’yes, it is so, and we know how.’  We are bound to proclaim that it is not any new thing that we expect, but only the working out of the old.  God be thanked that it is not!  The evils are not new, they have been from the beginning; and God has surely not been so cruel to the world as to leave it till now in the dark.  Our hopes are not set on any new, untried remedy.  This bridge across the Infinite for us is not a frail plank on which no one has yet walked, and which may crack and break when the timid foot of the first passenger is on the centre, but it is a tried structure upon which ages have walked.

Then if I have any hearers who are fancying that the gospel is worn out, any who are glowing with the anticipation of great new things, who scarcely know how, but believe that somehow, the ills that have in all ages cursed humanity are to be exorcised by some new methods of social organisation or the like—­I pray them to ponder this prayer and to receive its lesson.  Do not say, you are but adding one more to the Babel of opinions which confound us.  Not so.  We are not arguing for an opinion, we are proclaiming a fact.  We are not ventilating a nostrum, we are preaching a divine revelation, a divine revealer.  We are not setting forth our notion of the evil, and our idea of what may be a remedy.  We are telling men God’s word about both.  We are preaching an old, old truth:  not man’s opinion, but God’s act; not man’s device, but Christ’s power.  We proclaim that the kingdom of God is nigh you, and while a Babel, as you say, of private opinions, of passionate complaints, of despairing cries afflicts the silence, one serene voice rises, ’Come unto Me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden,’ and after that sole voice rings out the twofold choral anthem—­of praise, ’Rejoice, O earth, for thy King is come’; and of prayer, ‘Thy kingdom come.’

III.  We pray for the coming of a kingdom which is inward and spiritual.

I do not mean to weary you with any proofs that this is so.  The whole language of Christ, the whole tenor of Scripture, the common sense of the case, the testimony of our own souls as to what we want most, confirm this.  But it is enough to note the admitted fact; to enforce the thought that thus the kingdom assumes a purely individual character, and that thus its power over individuals is the pledge of its power over masses, and is its way of exercising universal sway.  ’We have all of us one human heart, and therefore what the kingdom can do and has done for me or for any oilier man, it can do for all.