kind of sham or hypocrisy; he would root out and utterly
destroy every kind of social evil, no matter what. John insisted that
it would be of no use for Jews to imagine that simply because they were
descendants of Abraham they would escape this general visitation; hence
his words to the Pharisees were particularly scathing: "O generation of
vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" It is
clear, therefore, that, in the opinion of the man who has now come to
be regarded as the forerunner of Jesus, the kingdom of God was to be an
earthly kingdom, was to come suddenly, and was to be inaugurated by a
sort of general judgment or clean sweep of all the elements that made
for oppression, cruelty, foul living, and pretentiousness of every
kind. It had not the remotest reference to a world to come or a Divine
Redeemer whose principal duty it should be to suffer and die in order
to secure a blessed immortality for those who believed in Him.

+Jesus' idea of the kingdom.+--How far Jesus shared these ideas at the
commencement of His own ministry it is impossible to say, but it seems
clear that He was attracted by the moral earnestness of John and wished
to associate Himself with those who were looking for a kingdom of God
which should mean the establishment and realisation of the moral ideal
in all human relations. But at the baptism a purpose long forming in
his mind appears to have taken definite shape. He felt Himself called
to preach the good news of a kingdom which could begin at once in the
heart of any man who was willing to become the instrument of divine
love and the expression of the ideal of human brotherhood. He went
into the wilderness to think this out and then came back to teach it.
I do not think He imagined that it could be realised quickly and
easily, but it seems fairly obvious that at first He expected that men
would be so glad to hear about it that they would hasten to avail
themselves of it. All through His ministry He spoke of little else,
and it was because of what He had to say about the nature of the
kingdom that His followers were attracted to Him. Hence, too, we have
the deathless teaching preserved for us in the synoptical gospels:
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven.... Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." The
meaning of Jesus is perfectly clear and perfectly simple. It is that
if a kingdom of universal brotherhood is ever