Page:Philochristus, Abbott, 1878.djvu/121

Rh Concerning citizenship in the Kingdom and how men should become citizens therein, he spake little to us, as being already citizens therein: save only this, that whoso would come, must come unto him; and through him, as through a door, they should pass into the Kingdom. And behold, the Kingdom was no other than a family, wherein God was at once Father and King, and all men were as children of the Father in Heaven. For the foundation of all was, that the heart and not the hands shaped the goodness and badness of all deeds, and made men to become citizens of the Kingdom: wherefore the heart and not the hands must be purified; nor could any be in truth citizens of the Kingdom except they had the thought of the Kingdom always in their hearts, so that their hopes and treasures were all stored up, not in the banks of money-changers, but in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Then he spake of the exceeding joys of the citizens of the Kingdom of God, and how they are free from all troubles and all disquietudes. But none, he said, could serve God and Mammon at one time; neither was it possible to serve God aright and yet to be distracted and torn asunder by cares concerning meat or raiment. Hereat the companion of Eliezer murmured again, saying that Jesus had before spoken blasphemously in joining the forgiving of sins by God with the forgiving of sins by men, and now he had spoken as a madman, in forbidding us to be careful about food and raiment; "Can a man sit," said he, "and search the Law, and not know whence he is to eat, and drink, and to be clad?" Now whether Jesus perceived his murmuring I know not: but he pointed, first upwards to the birds (for even at that instant there was a flight of pelicans above us) and then downward to the flowers, which bestrewed the side of the brook, and he said that our Father in Heaven fed the birds and clothed the