ay servants. And it
needs only a little imagination, looking along the lines of past
progress, to see the day when man shall stand king of the earth. He
shall make all these forces serve him. I believe that we have only just
begun this conquest. Already the wonders about us eclipse the wonders
of novelist and dreamer; and yet we have only begun to develop them.
What follows from this? When we have completed the conquest of the
earth, when we have discovered God's laws of matter and force and are
able to keep them, it means the abolition of all unnecessary pain,
unnecessary pain, I say; for all that pain which is not beneficent,
which is not inherent in the nature of things, is remedial. And we
preach the gospel, the coming of God's kingdom when pain shall be
abolished, and shall pass away.

Another step: We preach the gospel of the abolition of disease. We have
already, in the few civilized centres of the world, made the old
epidemics simply impossible. They are easily controlled. Nearly every
one of those that rise to threaten Europe and America to-day come from
the religious, ignorant, wild fanaticism of Asia, beyond the range of
our civilized control. The conditions of disease are discoverable; and
the day will come when, barring accidents here and there, well-born
people may calmly expect to live out their natural term of years. We
preach this gospel, then, of the kingdom of God in which disease shall
no more exist.

We preach a gospel that promises a time when war shall be no more. At
present wars are now and then inevitable; but they are brutal, they are
unspeakably horrible. And how any one who uses the sympathetic
imagination can rejoice, not over the victory, but over the destruction
of life and property which the victory entails, I cannot understand. We
have reached a time when civilized man no longer thinks he must right
his wrong with his fists or a club or a knife or a pistol. On the part
of individuals we call this a reversion to barbarism. The time will
come, and we are advancing towards it, when it will be considered just
as much a reversion to barbarism on the part of families, states,
nations, and when we shall substitute hearts and brains for bruises and
bullets in the settlement of the world's misunderstandings. We preach,
then, a gospel of the coming of the kingdom in which there shall be no
more war. And then life under the fair heavens will be sweet.

There shall be no more hunger in that kingd