spirits devoted to beneficent service, that they would soon become unable to distinguish its pleasures from pains, might even come to think annihilation better than such bliss. And were the city of God identical with any church, or even with all the churches, then so much of human craft and error would enter into it,so many things not noble or gentle would have been done in its name, it would so often have condemned as false what God has proved most surely true, that it would have to descend from its ideal perfection and stand among the imperfect and not rarely unjust states or societies of men. But the city of God may not be so construed; it is spiritual throughout. He is a spirit, and it is to be realized in and through the spirits He has formed. But it is on this account only the more real. The region of the spirit is the region of the eternal, therefore of the sublimest realities. this region the city of God has its seat, that it may the more absolutely mould man in the days of his mortal being into the very image and form of his immortality.

In

What is a city? As men now understand it, it is but a place where men have most congregated and built to themselves houses and workshops; where the exchange and the cathedral stand together, the one for admiration, the other for business; where warerooms run into long unlovely streets; where narrow and unfragrant closes are crowded with the poor, and spacious yet hard and monotonous squares are occupied by the rich. But city was not always so conceived. The Latin civitas, the Greek móis, had nobler meanings. Their cardinal and honourable sense was not the place, but the living community, the men of kindred blood and spirit, who claimed the same parentage,

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heired the same past, lived under the same laws, possessed the same privileges, liberties, and rights, followed the same customs, observed the same worship, believed the same religion. They were terms that expressed all that was ideal in the state and fatherland, all in them that appealed to the heart and conscience, evoked patriotism, and made freedom better and dearer than life. Over the men of Thermopylæ the words were written,

"To those of Lacedæmon, stranger, tell,

That as their laws commanded, here we fell."

They fell not for the Spartan earth, but for the ideals embodied in the community and its liberties, for Sparta as she lived to faith and love. A Greek tragic poet speaks of his fatherland as his mother, nurse, sister, the anchor and home of his soul. It made his manhood, and he loved it for what it made. So these words Tos and civitas were to the Greek and Roman respectively the parents of the terms that expressed their noblest ideas as to the collective and corporate life of their peoples, the qualities which gave them distinction, made them freeborn and privileged Outside the Toλis men were but slaves or barbarians; within the civitas men were civilized, lived ordered, kindly, courtly lives.

men.

And the city we here speak of bears this high ideal sense, only enlarged, exalted, and transfigured by the relation in which it stands to God. It is the society He has created, the community of men who know that they are His sons, regenerated and inspired by His truth, possessed of His Spirit, obedient to His will, working for His ends. What the Jew meant by

the kingdom, the Greek meant by the city of God; but they viewed the truth they so expressed under different aspects and from different standpoints. The kingdom accentuated the idea of the reign of God realized in the righteousness or obedience of man; but the city accentuated the idea of the Divine law or will realized in his free and ordered and richly beautiful social life. Spirits were needful to the realization of this ideal, but still more the creative and constitutive truths which made the spirits and organized the society. It was too immense to be limited to earth: the sainted dead and the saintly living were alike citizens. It was too imperishable to be bounded by time; the possibilities of obedience were inexhaustible. The realization of the ideal-though not the ideal itself, that was as eternal as God-had its beginning in time, but it would proceed throughout eternity. The more perfect a spirit becomes the greater its conformity to the Divine will. But above the highest degree reached, higher degrees rise in endless progression. The city of God is the society of godlike spirits with all their godlike capabilities and affinities in exercise and development, moving, as it were, out of their imperfection as creatures to the perfection loved and desired of the Creator.

2. The city of God, then, is an eternal, unrealized, yet realizable ideal,-an ideal that is to be for ever in the process of realization. This everlasting process is its very glory and last excellence, the secret of its endless attraction, the spell that awakens the activities that constitute heaven. God's is the only absolute perfection; man's is relative, contained in the high destiny which bids him ever struggle towards the Infinite

PROCESS OF REALIZATION ETERNAL.

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which he yet can never reach. There is no perfection so incomplete as the one which admits of no increase; that is the imperfection of death, not of life. God thinks too highly of man to be ever satisfied with what he is. The best possible for one moment is only the condition of a better possible for the next. But it is not enough that the city be a progressive ideal; it must possess the means and agencies necessary to the realization. And these exist. The eternal truths as to God and His Christ, the Divine energies and influences active in man, working in and through the churches, the benevolent and beneficent forces which act in society, in politics, in commerce, in art, in civilization as a whole, are of the city and work for it. Without these it could never be. They are the builders of the city, the agencies God uses to prepare and lay the living stones of the temple He designed, and inhabits and glorifies. By His truth He makes true men, conformed to the image of His Son. By His Spirit which dwelleth in them He brings them into a unity which expresses and exercises their life divine. Through the truths of God the ideals of God are realized, and the eternal way which leadeth to perfection opened to the energies, endeavours, and hopes of man.

Now, it is at this point that we see the relation of all our past discussions to the idea and ideal of the city of God. They have been concerned with the truths that make it at once possible and real,—that are, as it were, the factors of its reality, the conditions and agencies that work its realization. The eternal God builds the city, creation happens that He may build it. Man was made to be a citizen, and all his religions witness to

his yearning after his end, his passion for the fulfilmenť of his being. God calls, disciplines, and guides Israel, that He may the better bring to man the truths that at once create and qualify for citizenship. Jesus Christ comes as the Way to the city, the Truth from God which gives the Life of God, so creating the new or filial humanity, whose units are as He is, sons of God. To this end Christ was born and died and rose; to this end He reigns as King, He saves as Priest, He speaks as Prophet the things of God to men. Creation stands rooted in Him, and He completes it. Redemption, though later in history, was not later in the Divine purposes. God being God, the home of all rectitude, truth and graciousness, would never have made a world He did not mean to redeem; and Jesus Christ, the chief Corner-Stone of the city designed from eternity, its creative and normative personality, appeared in the fulness of time to bring in the everlasting righteousness. Through Him man becomes a "fellow-citizen with the saints," reaches and realizes his chief good, finds the way to that complete harmony with the Eternal Will which is purest beatitude and highest perfection.

III.

But these discussions must have a practical end. What function has the faith in the eternal city, with the hopes it creates, to fulfil in the common and often commonplace life of man? It were too large a matter to attempt to look at and answer this question on all its sides. The action of the ideal in humanity has been most beneficent; it is at this moment a centre of mighty moral energies. What forbids hope paralyses