ask that they be given a trial in business enterprises that are based on cooeperation, the joy of service as the incentive to toil, responsible trusteeship of that which each controls for the benefit of all the rest; in international relations where every nation comes not to be ministered unto but to minister, and loves its neighbors as itself—­to ask that we seriously try the social order of love.  John Bright, unveiling the statue to Cobden in the Bradford Exchange, said, “We tried to put Holy Writ into an act of Parliament.”  We want the mind of Christ put into commerce, laws, pleasures and the whole of human life.

And we come forward with confidence, because the Kingdom we advocate is not merely a protest and a program, but also a divine promise.  The ideal of the Kingdom of heaven to which our consciences respond is for us a religious inspiration, and has behind it a faithful God who would not deceitfully lure us to follow an illusive phantom.  “According to His promise we look for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.”  The city of our hope has not been designed by us, but has been already thought out in God’s mind and comes down out of heaven.  In our attack upon existing injustices and follies we raise again the believing watchword of the Crusaders, “Deus vult” In our attempt to rear the order of love, which cynics pronounce unpractical, we fortify ourselves in the assurance that it is God’s plan for His world, and that we shall discover a preestablished harmony between the Kingdom of heaven and the earth which we with Him must conform to it.  We encourage ourselves by recalling that, in the hearts of men everywhere and in the very fabric and structure of things, we have countless confederates.

On one of Motley’s most glowing pages, we are told how, after the frightful siege and fall of Haarlem, and with Alkmaar closely invested by the Duke of Alva, when the cause of the Netherlands seemed in direst straits, Diedrich Sonoy, the lieutenant governor of North Holland, wrote the Prince of Orange, inquiring whether he had arranged some foreign alliance, and received the reply:  “You ask if I have entered into a firm treaty with any great king or potentate; to which I answer, that before I ever took up the cause of the oppressed Christians in these provinces, I had entered into a close alliance with the King of kings; and I am firmly convinced that all who put their trust in Him shall be saved by His almighty hand.  The God of armies will raise up armies for us to do battle with our enemies and His own.”  And the opening of the dykes brought the very sea itself to the assistance of the brave contestants for truth and liberty.

The prayer on our lips, “Thy Kingdom come,” we believe to be of God’s own inspiring.  The social order which we seek is His eternal purpose; and it has sworn confederates in sun and moon and stars of light, and in every human heart.  We wait patiently and we work confidently, in the assurance that the God and Father of Jesus Christ, the Lord of heaven and earth, will not fail nor be discouraged, until He has set His loving justice in the earth, and His will is done among all the children of men, as it was once done by His well-beloved Son.