cision must, however, be a victory over all motions of doubt; and the more we have to overcome doubt, the fuller and the stronger becomes our faith. With this, then, the structure of our Gospels is most fully in harmony. It is not an accidental make-up, but belongs essentially to our stand-point, to our need. No document is put into our hands which excludes all doubt, which from its own nature convinces everybody. We stand to the Lord rather to-day as did the Pharisees who referred his wonderful works to the devil. The question presents itself, whether this Pharisaic unbelief is not after all worth more than the infidelity of these times, which resolves the Gospel miracles into mist and vapor.

It is a pernicious error of the times to pay especial homage to the spirit of negation; as though apprehending and recognizing were not more noble than misconstruing and assailing. Erudition, indeed, has never had the key to the kingdom of heaven. "Blessed are the poor in spirit." This being spiritually poor is suited to man and woman, high and low, learned and unlettered. How else would the Gospel be a power of God to the saving of all who believe in it? Unbelief is as old as Christianity; besides, it will never die out. But in the midst of the world of unbelief there is a large, royal band of those who believe. Did we wish to number them all, the heroes of faith, from John and Paul down, we should find many whom history has recorded among the foremost representatives of our race. The Lord's saying, "He that believeth not is condemned already," will to the end of days retain its crushing weight. Let us, therefore, take that word home to our hearts which the Apostle Paul addressed to his most loved church, that at Philippi, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling."

IX.

THE IDEA OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS CONSUMMATED, AND WHAT IT TELLS US REGARDING HISTORICAL CHRISTIANITY.

BY J. P. LANGE, D. D.,

PROFESSOR AT BONN.

We

HE theme of discussion which I have the honor to bring before you has been, in its essential thought, suggested to me by your honorable committee. In so doing, your committee has required of both speaker and hearer a somewhat formidable undertaking. The idea of the kingdom of God in its consummation is unmistakably a spiritual highland; the next hour, therefore, is to be occupied by us in a spiritual mountain ascent. cannot, however, deny, that, in our times, the physical traversing of Alps is more the order of the day than is the spiritual. Yet this reflection will not disturb a select audience of a bold northern maritime city. More suspicious might a second task appear to us, which the honorable committee has connected with our first. From the kingdom of God as consummated, i. e., in any case, from the idea of the farthest and highest scope of our Christian faith, from

1 The lecture here presented was delivered at Bremen in large part extemporaneously. Consequently, it accords strictly neither with the original sketch, nor with the oral discourse. The oral discourse, adapting itself to time and place, naturally touched upon many matters here omitted, especially many more scientific moments. On the other hand, meditation furnished many additions. In essentials, however, the present rendering fully reproduces the Bremen discourse.

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the still greatly concealed consummation of the still concealed kingdom of God, we are to draw conclusions regarding present times, nay, regarding the foundation anciently laid of that kingdom.

And yet this design, seemingly quite too bold, is, closely inspected, a truly happy thought. The question of the goal of life diffuses, wherever it is earnestly asked, a peculiar · light upon the ways of life at the very place where one is standing. The immediate consciousness of present endowments is, as an anticipation of the future, one of the most potent guiding stars of life. He who has earnestly fixed his eyes upon the true object of his life will surely find also the right way. The mother bows over her child in the cradle with the thought, he is to become a good, worthy man; this heart-thought becomes the light of the nursery, the tenor of the maternal prayers, the rule of the child's education. Above all things else, the haven, the end of the journey, is had in view by the mariner; and from this look ahead is shaped the certainty of the voyage under the motto, Navigare necesse est, vivere non.1 Just so Israel by a great religio-ethical look forward to the end of the world's course became the blessed people of the future, and would have remained the first-born among the nations, had it kept its forecast untarnished. There is, then, in the look to the ends and aims of life a great instructive, corrective, and determinative efficacy. If we cannot possibly walk together longer, then it behooves us to make a last attempt with . the question of the unity of aims. In the dispute concerning the ultimate ends, the mere exchanging of views ceases; here the ways differ and divide in ethical form. Among them, however, are distinguished, with respect to this form,

1 The motto of the Bremen "Seefahrt," the building in which the lecture was given.

the Hierarchical and the Protestant extremes; the author of the Syllabus pronounces in advance all views dissenting from his system godless, while the absolute protest, i. e., the absolute skepticism of the second degree, in the livery of thoughtlessness, demands that even the most radical negatives, which dissipate all the common religio-moral aims of humanity, shall be urged upon the conscience of no one. According to the first extreme, Christ could have said to the tempter in the wilderness, perhaps already with the first temptation, "Get thee hence, Satan!" According to the latter extreme, he should have answered him even after the third and last temptation, which disclosed his devilish design as the negation of all real aims: I have a different view on that point. Christianity, however, in the question of aims, will have to do least of all with unseasonable di- · versions. Therefore, the Apostle Peter, the same who refuted the frivolous judges who said of the phenomena occurring on the first Whitsuntide, "These men are full of new wine," with the quite dispassionate words, "It is but the third hour of the day" (9 A. M.), — the same has characterized the deniers of the Christian end of the world, who with sweeping rejection say, "Where is the promise of his coming?" as simply scoffers walking after their own lusts. The justification of this verdict, however, is found in the self-contradiction of which these persons are guilty who, in the concrete apprehension of the advent of the Lord, deny the moral aim of the world. While they deny not only the specifically Christian teleology, but also in general all teleology, all ends and ultimate ends in the world, they run with excitement and passion after their own false ends, and thus show that they have done with making life a poor jest. As it has been often and justly remarked, that absolute doubters refute themselves, since they make of doubt a great tenet;

1

that absolute protestants refute themselves, since they make the setting aside of all dogmas the principal dogma, the abolition of all confessions the modern confession; 1 so, in an eminent degree, this holds good also of those who put before them the particular end of banishing all ends from acknowledgment in the world of thought and from the reality of the objective world. Thus even the false ends

of egotism must testify to the inalienable existence of the true religio-moral ends grounded in the world's very constitution.

We now premise at once, that man is a social being; that mankind is a unit, and that this unit has a history, a history, which is above that of nature, entirely distinct from zoology into which some would degrade it, a regular development from a definite basis, according to definite laws, to a definite end; that is the end of the world. But can we now go farther and say, The end of the world is the kingdom of God in its consummation?

Let me indicate some general propositions, the truth of which we must assume to be granted, as we cannot here discuss them without going aside from the subject immediately in hand,—the postulates, then, upon which our affirmation rests, The end of the world is the kingdom of God in its consummation.

Proposition one. The world is subject to God, to the true, personal, i. e., eternally self-conscious, absolutely free God, who is love itself. Because he is free and spiritual, he has created and upholds the world as correspondingly free and spiritual.

Proposition two. The end which this God has in view regarding the world is none other than the establishment

1 As, indeed, even the negative thinkers in Paris style themselves Positivists.