conception of Christianity was. taken from his own lips.

These are his own life-plans

Tens of thousands of persons who are familiar with religious truths have not yet noticed that Christ ever founded a society in the world at all. The reason is partly that people have read texts instead of reading their Bible, partly that they have studied theology instead of studying Christianity, and partly because of the noiselessness and invisibility of the kingdom of God itself. As clearly as there comes to a child, when it begins to grow up, a knowledge of its father's business in the world, and a sense of what real life means, there must come to every Christian whose growth is true some richer sense of the meaning of Christianity and a larger view of Christ's purpose for mankind. To miss this is to miss the whole splendor and glory of Christ's religion. Next to losing the sense of a personal Christ, the first evil that can befall a man is to have no sense of anything else. To grow up in complacent belief that God has no business in this great world of human beings except to attend to a few religious people is the negation of all religion. The first great epoch in a Christian's life, after the wonder of its dawn, is when there breaks into his mind some sense that Christ has a purpose for mankind, a purpose beyond him and his needs, beyond the churches and their creeds, beyond heaven and its saints-a purpose which embraces every man and woman born, every kindred and nation formed, which regards not their spiritual good alone, but their welfare in every part, their progress, their health, their work, their wages, their happiness in this present world.

The modern word for the coming of the kingdom of God is the evolution of the world. Millions of years ago the evolution of the world began. The divine activities for ages and ages busied themselves with the creation and arranging of atoms and cells into beautiful and ordered wholes. Then, matter finished, the great hand worked it up into higher forms-moss and lichen, flower and tree, clothing the naked earth with a richer beauty and preparing it for a further evolution. Then another story was added to the structure: the world was peopled with animal life; the mollusk and the fish, the amphibian and the reptile, higher still the bird; highest of all, the mammal, and highest of all the mammals, the mammalian body of man. Then mind was made, and the higher emotions planted in the breasts of human beings.

Did the work then stop? Did the creative hand withdraw? Has the creative power run out? Is God dead? Is there no further evolution? If God has not ceased working, where shall we find him working? At the top of the building. What shall we find him doing? Carrying on the evolution to still further bounds, evolving men into higher men, taking the unnumbered atoms of humanity as a starting-point for a larger beginning, shaping them, rearranging them into nations, peoples, worlds, moulding them into a diviner symmetry and beauty. In other words, carrying on the evolution of the world. Watch the drama of the moral order rise up, scene after scene, in history. Study the social progress of humanity, the spread of righteousness, the gradual amelioration of life, the freeing of slaves, the elevation of woman, the purification of religion, and ask what these can be if not the coming of the kingdom of God on earth. For it is precisely through the movements of nations and the lives of men that this kingdom comes.

This recognition of Christian activity still working in the modern world is the first article in the Christian worker's faith. His work henceforth is not only scientific work but the highest scientific work that he could give his life to. He is the practical evolutionist. There came a time in the life of the individual when he learned to control his own destiny. No atom could do this, no wild plant or animal. The coming of that time marked one of the new epochs of evolution. The next epoch, which is even now dawning, is when the world, rising a larger consciousness, begins to take charge of its own development. On whom shall that charge mostly lie? On the Christian church. One faith, as Christian men, we hold in common"that the government shall be upon his shoulder." And how shall this government be directed and applied? Through his people. Men are the only means God's spirit has for accomplishing his purpose, and men will accomplish this purpose, and it is in full course of being accomplished, and it is the great business of the Christian church at the present hour to include within her borders all men under whatever name who are helping to accomplish this purpose, and direct every effort, in whatever direction, which will help it on by a hair's breadth.

A sentence more. If the church will not rise to this opportunity it will be left behind. The redemption of the world must

go on, and will go on outside of it and apart from it unless it reach out its arms on every side and welcome and assist whatever movements are in the line of a better world. "I am disposed to think," says a very distinguished doctor of divinity, "that a great and steadily increasing portion of the moral worth of society lies outside of the church, separated from it not by godlessness, but rather by exceptionally intense moral earnestness. Many, in fact, have left the church in order to be Christians." We must include these elements. We must call them Christians. They belong to the true Evangelical Alliance of those who pray, "Thy kingdom come."

Ladies and gentlemen, I look for, as a result of this gathering of the Alliance, a very remarkable movement throughout evangelical Christendom. You may think that the words which have been spoken during these days here may leave no further echoes than those which have reached these walls. But I am very much mistaken if from this time forward a new interpretation will not be given to the word "evangelical." That word we all love, but it has never had so large a meaning attached to it as it has at this Conference. I have little doubt that the complex and comprehensive nature of the programme that has been presented in the name of the Alliance to the public of America will have an effect upon the whole world. And I have no doubt whatever that if the largeness of view and the earnestness of the spirit in which the subjects here have been discussed can be kept up, very distinct progress must speedily be made in that evolution of the world, in that coming of Christ's kingdom, which we all have more at heart than anything else on earth

THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

BY PRESIDENT GEORGE A. GATES, D.D., OF IOWA COLLEGE, GRINNELL, IA.

HUMAN history is the terrestrial laboratory of God. To have here on this ball of earth a kingdom of God made out of the human race is the purpose of God so far as man is interested in God's purposes. What has God been doing toward this end so far? What method has he apparently pursued? How far has he brought the race along up to this time? Surely five or six thousand years should be time enough to furnish a hint in answer to such fundamentally practical inquiries.

"We sow the glebe, we reap the corn,

We build the house where we may rest;

And then, at moments, suddenly,

We look up to the great wide sky,

Inquiring wherefore we were born

For earnest, or for jest?"

An American of the heroic days said, “We have no means of judging the future but by the past." That is not quite true, but it is one of the most instructive ways of determining the future. A preliminary run through history may eliminate the chief danger, that a prophet fall in the ditch in his attempt to leap to the next point toward which the race is moving and being moved along.

The historical evolution of the kingdom of God on earth has been accomplished by the introduction of a few great ideas, and the race going to work toward them as ideals to be wrought into realities. This seems to be the divine method. Taking that line of historical development at the end of which stands our modern Christian civilization, we have no difficulty in discovering the main landings on the stairway up which God has led our race.

The first great idea of which the race somehow got possession is

I. MONOTHEISM.

Over against the gods many and lords many, one people got hold on the idea that God is one. A fresh soil was needed for this seed. One man, Abraham, was called out to be the beginning. By slavery for two or four centuries his descendant people were humbled to docility. Then came the great revelation-not "We are," but "I am that I am."

Now the last thing that this human race ever wanted or wants now is a new idea. It has always crucified new ideas.

Back the people went over and over again to the former and neighboring gods. The long struggle is still on, the effort of the race to become monotheistic. Men want to-day something else besides God about as much as they ever did. We talk of the universe and God, matter and God, nature and God, and sometimes even man and God, with as radical denial of the one God as ever Israel showed in running back to Ashtoreth and Moloch. There may be a profounder meaning than men have. yet thought in the prayer of Jesus, "That they may be one, even as we."

Here we see the meaning of monotheism as of practical importance to the progress of the race. It is not merely a piece of metaphysical theology. Monotheism is not chiefly a speculative truth; it is of the most fearful importance as an ethical truth. Any sort of polytheism is not merely a philosophical error; it lays the axe at the root of righteousness. Worship becomes politics and diplomacy and the door is swung wide for a divided allegiance. We are no longer polytheists. But a deadly dualism is at the root of many of the failures of human society. The secular and the sacred, the moral and the religious, are distinctions of the devil's own invention. Therein the lazy and vicious conscience of men finds easy excuse. Men live the selfish life in one and vainly try to live the unselfish life in the imaginary other. Hence largely is the great gulf in the church between profession and life. The early Hebrews refused to be monotheists, actual worshippers of the one and living God, because to accept the great revelation as the law of life would leave no room for selfishness and sin. Men still reject monotheism for the same reason. If men can only be permitted to