That now was the form into which all his life must fall.He recalled his vision of the silver sphere and of ten thousand diverse minds about the world all making their ways to the same one conclusion.Here at last was a king and emperor for mankind for whom one need have neither contempt nor resentment; here was an aim for which man might forge the steel and wield the scalpel, write and paint and till and teach.Upon this conception he must model all his life.Upon this basis he must found friendships and co-operations.All the great religions, Christianity, Islam, in the days of their power and honesty, had proclaimed the advent of this kingdom of God.It had been their common inspiration.Areligion surrenders when it abandons the promise of its Millennium.He had recovered that ancient and immortal hope.All men must achieve it, and with their achievement the rule of God begins.He muttered his faith.It made it more definite to put it into words and utter it."It comes.It surely comes.To-morrow Ibegin.I will do no work that goes not Godward.Always now it shall be the truth as near as I can put it.Always now it shall be the service of the commonweal as well as I can do it.I will live for the ending of all false kingship and priestcraft, for the eternal growth of the spirit of man...."He was, he knew clearly, only one common soldier in a great army that was finding its way to enlistment round and about the earth.He was not alone.While the kings of this world fought for dominion these others gathered and found themselves and one another, these others of the faith that grows plain, these men who have resolved to end the bloodstained chronicles of the Dynasts and the miseries of a world that trades in life, for ever.They were many men, speaking divers tongues.He was but one who obeyed the worldwide impulse.He could smile at the artless vanity that had blinded him to the import of his earlier visions, that had made him imagine himself a sole discoverer, a new Prophet, that had brought him so near to founding a new sect.
Every soldier in the new host was a recruiting sergeant according to his opportunity....And none was leader.Only God was leader....
"The achievement of the Kingdom of God;" this was his calling.
Henceforth this was his business in life....
For a time he indulged in vague dreams of that kingdom of God on earth of which he would be one of the makers; it was a dream of a shadowy splendour of cities, of great scientific achievements, of a universal beauty, of beautiful people living in the light of God, of a splendid adventure, thrusting out at last among the stars.But neither his natural bent nor his mental training inclined him to mechanical or administrative explicitness.Much more was his dream a vision of men inwardly ennobled and united in spirit.He saw history growing reasonable and life visibly noble as mankind realized the divine aim.All the outward peace and order, the joy of physical existence finely conceived, the mounting power and widening aim were but the expression and verification of the growth of God within.Then we would bear children for finer ends than the blood and mud of battlefields.Life would tower up like a great flame.By faith we reached forward to that.The vision grew more splendid as it grew more metaphorical.And the price one paid for that; one gave sham dignities, false honour, a Levitical righteousness, immediate peace, one bartered kings and churches for God....He looked at the mean, poverty-struck room, he marked the dinginess and tawdriness of its detail and all the sordid evidences of ungracious bargaining and grudging service in its appointments.
For all his life now he would have to live in such rooms.He who had been one of the lucky ones....Well, men were living in dug-outs and dying gaily in muddy trenches, they had given limbs and lives, eyes and the joy of movement, prosperity and pride, for a smaller cause and a feebler assurance than this that he had found....
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