THE KINGDOM OF GOD WITHIN.'

BY THE REV. STOPFORD A. BROOKE, M.A., LL.D.

'The Kingdom of God is within you.'-Luke xvii. 21.

EARLY forty-five years have passed away

NE

since I was first permitted to speak in London of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; and when I look back to 1857, and think of the progress made since then in Liberal Theology, I am full of astonishment at the swiftness of the progress, and of thankfulness to God that, in the swiftness, we who are met here to-night, and those who in the churches and other Nonconformist bodies than our own have fought in the same cause, have been so led by the great Guide, that neither by reaction nor by overexcitement into extremes, have we lost the deepholding anchors of the Faith delivered to us by our Master Jesus.

Many new religions and philosophies, the com

1 The sermon preached in St. James's Hall, London, on Tuesday evening, May 28th, 1901, at the annual service of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, and in connection with the meetings of the International Council of Unitarian and other Liberal Religious Thinkers and Workers.

mon property of which is the exclusion of the spiritual world in which a divine Father comes into the direct contact of love with man, his child, have been offered to our acceptance. We have taken what was good in them and true; we have not abused or decried them; but we have clung fast to that which they ignored or denied, and claimed for it supremacy. We have kept the Faith through a long and arduous battle. The little stream of Liberal Theology which had risen, almost unnoticed, about 1832, high on the mountain side, and had made its way over rocks and shallows, and among storms, with a joyous life in its increasing waters, had in the years between 1850 and 1870 reached the most rugged and difficult part of its descent. It had to make its way and keep its faith against the steady attacks of the Evangelical and High Church parties; who, themselves opposed to one another, united against its progress. It had to accept the proved truths of science and historical criticism, and yet not surrender, as the devotees of science and criticism too often did, the root ideas of the Christian Faith. It was not unfaithful, at any point, to physical, intellectual, or moral truth. But it maintained, beyond all the conclusions of science, criticism, or ethics, that there was a spiritual world, in which God and man met together as Father and child, and whose truths were more vital to the welfare of humanity than anything else in the universe. Thus, while accepting the lower truths, it maintained the higher. This is the battle it fought, and the

stream, to which I have likened it, had for many years a broken, tormented, and contending life. Those days are all but passed away. Its waters have now emerged from the foot-hills, and we stand beside them in comparative peace. The turbulent stream has become a full-fed and quiet river, running swiftly, it is true, and now and then disturbed, but destined to greater peace, and widening into deeper channels day by day, fit before long to have the cities of a nobler religion than England has yet known built upon its banks; and desiring to meet with a joyous welcome, in the ocean of God's love into which it will finally flow, its brother rivers from all lands.

Its former enemies come now to drink of its waters. Science and criticism have begun to feel the extremes into which they have driven their opposition to the spiritual, and are drawing near to a religion which does not deny what is proved to be true by them; but which asserts truths beyond the sphere of their activity. They feel necessities of the soul which their special work does not touch or satisfy.

The orthodox have not only modified their opposition, they have yielded at many points. The Evangelical has become as liberal as the man he attacked with virulence in 1860. The High Churchman has published books on Inspiration which would have earned him from his brethren a summons before the Courts of Law forty years ago. What ancient history, what a dream, it must seem to the

orthodox Nonconformist and Churchman, when they think of the prosecution set on foot, after the 'Essays and Reviews,' against the assumed denial of Eternal Punishment! What a vast difference there is everywhere, save in a few fossil remnants of the past, between the moral idea of God's nature and his love, in 1860 and that held in the first year of this century! In that, more than in all else, Christianity has approached more nearly to the Gospel of Christ. Yes! religious men have all drawn together; but they have drawn together towards Liberal Theology, not away from it. We welcome the approach of our opponents, and long for a closer union with them in a simpler Faith. And for ourselves, that is, for all liberal theologians, in whatever Church or sect or nation we may be, whatever be our differences of opinion, we look forward to a closer union than we have yet attained. It shall be ours, if only we hold fast to the few spiritual truths which assume as their father-truth that God is, and that he loves all men and women with the love, omnipotent for their salvation, which he revealed and embodied in Jesus Chist. That is the binding, uniting power.

There are many who still limit this love, make it conditional on confession of doctrine or observance of ritual, but we proclaim it without conditions. It is no less infinite and unconditioned than God himself. And, year by year, the churches and sects are coming swiftlier-though the movement, through its vastness, seems slow to us-into that one doctrine,