(2) It is manifest that the kingdom must be constantly coming, or else all the saints would soon be in heaven. The Spirit is continually renewing the hearts of men and sanctifying them, and so the leaven is working, the mustard-seed is growing, and the kingdom is extending. The line of progress is not steady; it wavers here and there; it advances and recedes now and then: but on the whole, it is advancing, with the promise of final conquest. Christ "must reign, till he hath put all his enemies under his feet" (1 Cor. 15: 25). The prayer, "Thy kingdom come," is being answered.

Thus Christ has already set up a kingdom upon earth, peculiar in its notes or characteristics. Such a kingdom must manifest itself, and, coming into a world of sin, it must cause strife and stir (Matt. 10: 34-36). It is revolutionary, overturning whatever opposes, and reconstructing on the principles of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. This will go on until the final consummation.

II.

THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN IN MANIFESTATION.

§ 37. It is the nature of life to manifest itself in some organism; and the life of Christ, penetrating human history, constituting a spiritual, holy, progressive kingdom, must manifest itself in human conduct and institutions. It can not be hidden. The leaven, by the law of its being, must work. The seed must grow or die. Light must shine, and fire burn. So in a world "dead through trespasses and sins" (Eph. 2: 1), the life of God, to reach its ends, must renew the heart of the individual, establish the communion of saints, and found institutions for fellowship and nurture. The redemption of a lost world must be a manifested work. But as the kingdom of heaven is a development from the preceding dispensations, its manifestation must show close connection with them. There is more than a mere succession; there is also a continuation. There is a unity of life running through the patriarchal, the ceremo

nial, and the Christian dispensations, as unity of life runs through the larva, the chrysalis, and the butterfly. We can trace this continuity.

(1) The ceremonial dispensation was bound to the patriarchal, not only by love, and faith, and repentance, and the redemptive scheme, but also by a special covenant made with Abraham and sealed by circumcision. The Seed of the woman, the Messiah, constitutes the central unity, the divine bond of continuity, as the covenant and seal constitute the organic lines of development.

(2) The Christian dispensation was bound to the ceremonial as a flower to its stem, not only by love, faith, repentance, the covenant, and the Messiah and King, but also by rites and forms of worship. "The Church polity of our first century does not present itself as a fresh creation, but rather as a continuation of a régime already there, simply modified to fit the needs of the new spiritual life and purposes.' "" 6 Here too there was more than a succession: there was a continuation, a development.

§ 38. But the method of this development, and hence of manifestation, was not comprehended by the Jews. How the Son of David should ascend the throne of his father and rule the world was by no means clear, not even to his chosen apostles (Acts 1: 6), while his disciples held a most perverted conception respecting it (John 6: 15). Yet the spiritual nature of the kingdom had been revealed, and it was in ways suited thereto that Jesus sought to establish and manifest his glorious kingdom. A process of separation along a spiritual line was begun by John the Baptist in the baptism of repentance. He separated the Jews, imperfectly indeed, on the line of faith and repentance (Matt. 3: 5, 6), as they were separated from others on the line of carnal descent from Abraham (John 8: 39). He laid the axe unto the root of the trees (Matt. 3: 10), thus beginning a process of separation which the winnowing-fan of Christ should

Prof. E. B. Andrews, in 40 Bib. Sac. 51.

continue (Matt. 3: 12). Christ took up the process of his forerunner and carried on the winnowing, thoroughly cleansing his threshing-floor, until a complete separation was effected on or along the spiritual boundary of his kingdom. The multitudes that followed him were divided; those who looked for the establishment of a world-wide temporal kingdom more and more deserted him; while those who dimly discerned a spiritual realm, after long and patient training (John 16: 31), clung hesitatingly to him. His fan was in his hand. The process of separation hastened. He journeyed, and preached, and warned, and wrought miracles, and prayed, until the great majority rejected and crucified their Messiah. "He came unto his own, and they that were his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God" (John 1: 11, 12). That is, all Israel, the nation of priests, the kahal, or congregation, or Church of God, as externally organized, were cut off from all the privileges and promises of the covenant as children of Abraham, and from the law of Moses as the kahal, or congregation of Israel, by the one act of crucifixion, except the little band of Christ's recognized disciples. They remained the true kahal of Israel. All other Jews therein became apostates. The process of winnowing had cleansed the threshing-floor.

§ 39. Thus through Christ's first disciples the Church of God was continued. They then constituted it on earth. They were the wheat separated from a nation of chaff, the true seed of Abraham, the "little flock," to whom the Father gave the kingdom (Luke 12: 32). They became the Christian Church, recognized and ordained as such on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2: 1-4). They had fulfilled all righteousness in keeping the ritual law, and so needed not to be baptized and were never baptized with Christian baptism. They were the Church in transition. All that joined them, after their divine recognition as such on Pentecost, were baptized into Christ (Acts 2: 38, 41; 8: 38; 11: 16;

etc.). A striking case was the baptism of John's disciples at Ephesus, A.D. 56 (Acts 19: 3-5). As the winnowing, or separation, had left all who had not become disciples of Jesus outside the Church, no one could be admitted to fellowship except through the rite of Christian baptism, as Christ had enjoined (Matt. 28: 19). There was no cleavage, no mere succession, but instead continuity, development, evolution, the passing of the family Church into the national, and the national into the ecumenical form. The three dispensations are not three precious stones placed in divine succession, but the same life of God in human history, growing out of the limitations of narrower forms into the universal and unlimited: one Church in three forms.

$40. As was natural and inevitable, the manifestation of the kingdom rejected much which belonged to the ceremonial dispensation and retained what could be used. The national could not be stretched into the ecumenical, and every attempt to do it has fettered the feet of the Christian Church. Paul regarded the Jews as "kept in ward under the law," as under a "tutor," and not as sons in true liberty. The Aaronic priesthood, the ceremonial law, the altar, the sacrifices, the feasts, the temple, the place and mode of worship, the dress of those officiating, were all fulfilled in Christ. They have been outgrown and abolished, as is elaborately declared in Hebrews (see especially 9: 12, 25, 26; 10: 12, 18; 7: 18, 19): "The bond written in ordinances," . . . Christ took it "out of the way, nailing it to the cross" (Col. 2: 14). Men thereafter could worship God acceptably anywhere and in any way, if in spirit and in truth (John 4: 21-23). Hence adhesion thereafter to the ceremonial law is rightly called bondage (Gal. 5: 1) and a falling away from the scheme of grace, if relied on for salvation (Gal. 5: 2-4).

But the kingdom retains in its manifestation the Sabbath; the family; the Sacred Scriptures, adding to them the law of the New Covenant, which all communions hold to be

inspired; the cardinal virtues, which here find their fullest development; the vicarious atonement through sacrifice, for Christ offered once for all his own life a ransom for the world; and the priesthood in Christ, a new order, "after the power of an endless life" (Heb. 7: 16). In short, the manifested kingdom retains all the essentials of the preceding dispensations and so many of the incidentals as could be adapted to a free, spiritual, ecumenical Church, and rejected all the rest.

§ 41. One of these incidentals retained in substance is the synagogue form of worship. We have already alluded (§ 25) to this outgrowth of the religious life of the Jews, but it needs fuller treatment. For "as the Christian Church rests historically on the Jewish Church, so Christian worship and the congregational organization rest on that of the synagogue and cannot be well understood without it."7 As the kingdom of heaven manifests itself chiefly in and through local congregations, and worship therein, we call attention to the origin of this kind of worship.

(1) The synagogue form of worship had its origin in a want which the national worship could not itself satisfy (§ 25). The Babylonian captivity revealed the inadequacy of the temple service, from which relief was found in synagogues. These the dispersion made universal and popular. Without a temple, sacrifices, feasts, and the ordained worship, there sprung up, how we do not know, an unauthorized kind of worship in local congregations, which was both a necessity and a prophecy, a sign of the decadence of the national establishment and the hope of better things, if not of a new dispensation.

(2) Born in the sorrows of captivity, when Israel's harps hung upon the willows in Babylon, the synagogue would have been rejected after the return as the remembrancer of exile, had it not met a universal want a want so common that, in Christ's time, "not a town, not a village, if

7 Hist. Christ. Ch. 1, 456, by Dr. Philip Schaff.