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 CHRISTIAN SOCIOLOGY 431

righteous were to shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. 1

As to when this supplementing of growth by cataclysm shall come, Jesus gives us no information. But that he should have seen the necessity of it is a tribute to his sense of reality. Men of persistent anti-filial and anti-fraternal disposition can never be made into loving brethren. Their removal is the only hope of a permanently peaceful fraternity. Just what Jesus meant by the striking imagery in which he clothed this thought we cannot clearly see. That it may mean revolution or some other tremen- dous political change is not clear and yet not to be absolutely denied in the light of his references to the destruction of Jerusalem. But, whatever it may be, it will mark the triumph of the new social order. Penal action will reach its consummation in the isolation of offenders. Individual and institutional life will no longer testify to the reign of even an enlightened selfishness. The world will, by virtue of man's endeavor and God's regener- ating power, have been transformed into the kingdom. And the triumph, of this new and perfected humanity, this eternal fraternity which he described and instituted and for which centuries have travailed this is the coming of the Lord.

"There remaineth, therefore, a Sabbath rest for the people of God." So wrote the author of the epistle to the Hebrews as he looked back upon a restless, defeated theocracy, and forward towards the future of the true Judaism. 9 So, too, many a weary one, beaten back in his endeavor to bring to an unwilling world Christ's blessing of brotherliness and love has looked toward the East, hoping that through the darkness of the sin and misery and social inequality of the world in which he lived there might break the dawn of that great Sabbath. And through the ages full many another crushed down by circumstance has listened for the "I come quickly" of his Lord, eager to cry out in wel- come, "Amen! Even so come, Lord Jesus." For it is no dream or unintelligible apocalypse that meets us in the words

'Matt. 13:43. Heb. 4:9.