Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/381

Rh —the sight and the proclamation of the Invisible in that which his senses revealed to him. And his idea of the kingdom of God was no sweet Greek dream of a past Golden Age, but an intoxicating belief in a new state, in which righteousness was to reign and his enemies were to bow before the Anointed of Jehovah. His hope for the future was for an everlasting Jerusalem that was to descend from Heaven, arrayed like a bride for her bridegroom, as free as God's own realm. Even when the new kingdom grew more remote, and the hopelessness of a tranquil realization of its sway grew weak, the Jew never thought of it as anything but social. Its members might have passed through a resurrection, and have survived the fearful woes that ushered in its glories, but they were yet members, inseparable from each other and from the Messiah.

It was with the approaching fulfilment of this undefined expectation of an actual, concrete, though divine, political society, that Jesus began his preaching. He took the hope as he found it. He never needed to define it. He had simply to correct and elevate the immanent idea. The Christian kingdom is the Jewish kingdom, but transfigured and made universal by the clarifications of Jesus. Membership in it is no longer to be a matter of birth. The "children of the kingdom" were to know that the despised Gentile might enter in before them. Thus it is that, although Jesus sometimes refers especially to the dominion of God in his kingdom, he generally keeps, prominent the social conception.

2. And as a new social order the kingdom of God had really began to be appreciable if only men would so believe. It was among them; his divine benefactions were evidence that it had come upon them; the unworthy hamlet that refused the entrance of its heralds was yet to know that in rejecting them it had rejected the object of its hopes. And the analogies with which this present and appreciable kingdom is described are full of social signification. As in its very genesis the term denoted