THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

3. The Conditions of Entrance.

THE second Evangelist represents our Lord as commencing His public ministry in Galilee, with the announcement, "The kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe in the good news." Repentance and faith were thus at the outset declared to be the conditions of admission into the kingdom. What did Christ mean by the words, and why are the things denoted indispensable to citizenship?

The doctrine of Jesus on repentance and faith, especially the former, can be fully understood only when we have become acquainted with other parts of His teaching, particularly His doctrine concerning God, man, and the righteousness of the kingdom. The contents of the idea of repentance must depend on the views set forth on these cardinal topics. If God be a Father, then repentance will mean ceasing to regard Him under any lower aspect; if man be a being of infinite importance as a moral subject and son of God, then repentance will mean realizing human dignity and responsibility; if the righteousness of the kingdom be spiritual and inward, having reference not merely to outward acts but to motives, then the summons to repentance will be a call not merely to a life for moral ends, but to self-criticism, so as to discern between true and false righteousness. For the present our inquiry must refer more to form than to matter, to principles rather than to details. These after all are the chief points; for when we have settled the general nature of repentance, as Christ preached it, the particulars can be filled in afterwards without difficulty.

1 Mark i. 15.

On this subject, as in reference to the idea of the kingdom, there is a marked difference in tone and drift between Christ's teaching and that of the Baptist. Both use the same form of words, but they do not mean the same thing. The one instance of divergence is the effect of the other. Christ's conception of repentance springs out of His new thoughts concerning the kingdom of heaven. "When heaven and earth move towards each other, as in Christ's preaching of the kingdom, then on the part both of God and man must the Nay give place to the Yea, anger to love, fear to joy, shame to right action; and in festive attire, not in mourning weeds, all that has affinity for the Divine goes to meet the approaching God, proud to be or to become like Him." The contrast between Jesus and John is specially apparent at two points. There is first an inwardness in Christ's doctrine that is wholly lacking in John's. To perceive this we have only to compare the Sermon on the Mount with the directions given by the Baptist to publicans, soldiers, and others, who inquired what he would have them do. The sermon, which considered positively is an exposition of the righteousness of the kingdom, may be regarded negatively as an aid to self-criticism and exhortation to repentance. With this view it bids men look into their hearts, and examine their affections and the motives from which apparently good actions spring. John, on the other hand, directed attention merely to outward conduct, admonishing penitents to practise neighbourliness, honesty, contentment with their wages. It was enough, if the coming kingdom was merely the restored theocratic kingdom of Israel, a secular kingdom, only more virtuous than usual. In a kingdom of this world the ruler can take cognisance only of external acts. If the people abstain from stealing, violence, lying, adultery, they are in the eye of law a righteous nation; and they are treated as such even by the moral order of the world, for every nation which practises these and kindred 1 Keim, Jesu von Nazara, ii. 77.

2 Luke iii. 10-14.

The fact that Christ turned the

virtues is found to prosper. thoughts of His hearers from acts to dispositions, shows conclusively that He had in view a kingdom of another and higher description," not of this world."

The other point of contrast is that repentance as John preached it was an affair of details, while as Christ preached it, it was a matter of principle, a radical change in the chief end of life. John came preaching in the wilderness of Judæa, saying, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." He meant, "Alter your ways wherever they are amiss, for the great, dread King is near."

His call resembled a summons to the population of a city to which the monarch is about to make a royal visit, to remove all nuisances out of the way, and to put on holiday attire, and turn out into the street to give their sovereign a worthy reception. But Christ called men to more than a reform of this or that bad habit, even to a radical change of mind, consisting in the recognition of the kingdom as the highest Good, and the most important subject that could engage their attention. "Seek ye first," He said, "the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; "1 meaning, "Hitherto ye have been living as if life were no more than meat, and the supreme question for you has been, What shall we eat, what shall we drink, wherewithal shall we be clothed; henceforth let a loftier aim guide you, even to be citizens of the Divine kingdom, and to have a character becoming members of that holy commonwealth.” The form of the exhortation shows that the kingdom the speaker had in view was not the theocratic kingdom of popular expectation. In that case He would have said, Seek ye first the righteousness of the kingdom, and only in the second place its temporal advantages; for the people were seeking the kingdom in the : national sense already, their only fault was that they put the material and political aspects of it before the moral. That was in effect what the Baptist said. He assumed that his

1 Matt. vi. 31. The Vatican reading will be noticed hereafter.

hearers desired the coming of the kingdom, and bade them prepare for it by repentance and the culture of right conduct, lest its coming should prove to them the reverse of a blessing. Christ, on the other hand, was conscious that He had in His eye a kingdom for whose advent the average Jew did not long, which, nevertheless, would be a priceless boon to all who received it. Therefore He said not merely, Seek the righteousness of the kingdom, but, Seek the kingdom itself and its righteousness. And the call, as already said, was a summons to a radical repentance, a true μeтávoia, a change of mind not in reference to this or the other department of conduct, but in reference to the fundamental question, What is man's chief end and chief good?

Thus understood, the call to repentance issued by Jesus is seen to be no arbitrary requirement, but the indication of an indispensable condition of citizenship. If the kingdom be the highest conceivable object of human aims and hopes, it ought to be regarded and treated as such; and if men have not been hitherto doing that, to ask them to do it is, in other words, to summon them to repentance. And this being the meaning of the summons, we further perceive why it should be addressed to all, as it was by Jesus. For it is certainly not the way of men anywhere to make the kingdom of God of Christ's gospel their chief end and chief good. For the many material goods, "food and raiment," are the first objects of desire. "After these things do the Gentiles seek." After these things,

it is to be feared, the majority of Israelites sought more than after righteousness, even in the lower sense of right conduct, justice, truth, honesty. There was therefore an urgent need for repentance even from the Baptist's point of view; and if his call had been generally responded to, it would have - brought about an immense improvement in the actual state of things. How much greater was the need of repentance if man's chief end was to seek the righteousness and the kingdom Christ preached, a righteousness of the heart, a kingdom of

filial relations with God. How rare the men even in Israel who cared supremely or at all for these high matters!

With such a high ideal of life, we are not surprised to find Christ preaching repentance even to His own disciples at a late stage of His intercourse with them. The admonition to seek first the kingdom had been addressed principally if not exclusively to them, towards the commencement of the Galilean ministry; and towards its close their Master found it necessary to give them this more stern one: "Except ye turn, and become as the children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven."1 The term employed to denote the moral change is new, but the thing insisted on is the same, even a radical change of mind with regard to the chief end of life. It may indeed appear that in this case it is rather the correction of a special fault, pride or ambition, that is pointed at, than the great revolution of an initial spiritual crisis; a conversion in detail rather than in principle. Such special conversions or repentances are to be looked for in the course of religious experience, even in those who have already undergone radical renewal; for after the new principle of life has been adopted, it has to be worked out in all departments of conduct, and while this is being done, conflicts with old habits of thought and feeling and action are almost certain to occur. It was to such a conversion in detail, in the experience of Peter, Jesus alluded when, with reference to that disciple's sin of moral cowardice in denying his Master, He said, "When thou hast turned strengthen thy brethren." And we can hardly bring ourselves to believe that Jesus seriously considered anything more than such a conversion necessary in the case of men who had been so long with Him, even when their sin was not, like Peter's, one of infirmity due to a surprise, but a rooted evil disposition breaking out into

1 Matt. xviii. 3.

2 arpars. The compound irpio occurs three times in Luke's Gospel; twice in i. 17, and in xxii. 32. In Acts the verb and the corresponding noun are used to denote the conversion of Gentiles from Paganism to Christianity.