It has an almost inexhaustible many-sidedness. We are
examining here but one aspect. We have seen in the passages studied this
week that Jesus himself linked his own suffering and rejection with the
fate of the prophets who were before him and with the fate of his
disciples who would come after him. He saw a red line running through
history, and his own life and death were part of it. He himself
generalized the social value of his peculiar experience, and taught us to
see the cross as a great social principle of the Kingdom of God. He saw
his death as the highest demonstration of a permanent law of human life.

I

Evil is socialized, institutionalized, and militant. The Kingdom of God
and its higher laws can displace it only by conflict. "Truth forever on
the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne." This clash involves suffering.
This suffering will fall most heavily on those who most completely embody
the spirit and ideas of the Kingdom, and who have the necessary boldness
to make the fight.

In most men the eternal moral conflict gets only confused understanding.
Sometimes they are aroused by sentimental pity or indignation, but soon
tire again. If their own interests are affected they fight well. But there
are men and women whose minds have been made so sensitive by personal
experiences or so cleansed by right education and by the spirit of God
that they take hold of the moral issues with a really adequate
understanding. Living somehow on the outskirts of the Kingdom of Heaven,
they have learned to think and feel according to its higher ways, and when
they turn toward things as they now are, of course there is a collision;
not this time a collision of interests, but a clash of principles, of
justice with wrong, of truth with crafty subterfuges, or of solidarity
with predatory selfishness.

The life and fate of these individuals anticipates the issues of history.
This is the prophetic quality of their lives. Working out the moral and
intellectual problems in their minds before the masses have realized them,
they become the natural leaders in the fight, clarify the minds of others,
and thus become, not only forerunners, but invaluable personal factors in
the moral progress of the race. "The single living spirits are the
effective units in shaping history; all common tendencies working toward
realization must first be condensed as personal forces in such minds, and
then by interaction between them work their way t