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leads up to the very throne of the Almighty. Jesus taught that the
kingdom of God might begin anywhere and at any time in any human heart.
Note what Matthew Arnold has called the secret and the method of Jesus.
He says, The secret of Jesus is that he who selfishly seeks his life
shall lose it: he who throws it away for good and God finds it. Do we
need to go very deeply into human life to discover the profound truth
of that saying? Seek all over the world for good and happiness, and
forget to look within, and you do not find it. The kingdom of heaven is
within. It is in the spirit, the temper of the heart, the disposition,
the life. And the secret of it is in cultivating love and truth and
tenderness and care, those things which bring us into intimate
connection with which we mean when we say, Be unselfish, and that in
doing this we find our own souls. For the man who gives out of himself
love and tenderness and care, of necessity cultivates the qualities of
love and tenderness and care; and those are the ones which are the
essence of all soul-building. And he who looks outside for the greatest
things of life misses them; while he who looks within, and cultivates
the spirit, finds God and happiness and truth.
This gospel, then, that the kingdom of God is at hand, is always ready
to come, is the gospel which we proclaim. And now I wish to extend that
idea a little. The form in which Jesus held his dream of human good has
changed in the process of the centuries. We no longer expect a
miraculous revelation of a kingdom coming out of the heavens to abide
on earth. The form of it is changed; but the essence of it we hold
still, the same perfect condition of men here on earth and in the
future which Jesus held and proclaimed.
Now let me hint to you a few of the elements that make up this hope for
man which we liberals proclaim everywhere as the gospel, the good news
of the coming kingdom of God.
In the first place, we proclaim the possibility of human conquest over
this earth. What do I mean by that? I mean that man is able and he is
showing that ability ultimately to control the forces of this planet,
and make them his servants. Within the last seventy-five years this
increasing conquest has changed the face of the planet. We now use
water power not only, but steam, electricity, magnetism. All these
secret forces that thrill from planet to planet and sun to sun we use
as our household and factory drudges, our every-d
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