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This transfiguration of the world into a theocracy may seem a merely
fantastic idea to anyone who comes to it freshly without such
general theological preparation as the preceding pages have made.
But to anyone who has been at the pains to clear his mind even a
little from the obsession of existing but transitory things, it
ceases to be a mere suggestion and becomes more and more manifestly
the real future of mankind. From the phase of "so things should
be," the mind will pass very rapidly to the realisation that "so
things will be." Towards this the directive wills among men have
been drifting more and more steadily and perceptibly and with fewer
eddyings and retardations, for many centuries. The purpose of
mankind will not be always thus confused and fragmentary. This
dissemination of will-power is a phase. The age of the warring
tribes and kingdoms and empires that began a hundred centuries or so
ago, draws to its close. The kingdom of God on earth is not a
metaphor, not a mere spiritual state, not a dream, not an uncertain
project; it is the thing before us, it is the close and inevitable
destiny of mankind.
In a few score years the faith of the true God will be spreading
about the world. The few halting confessions of God that one hears
here and there to-day, like that little twittering of birds which
comes before the dawn, will have swollen to a choral unanimity. In
but a few centuries the whole world will be openly, confessedly,
preparing for the kingdom. In but a few centuries God will have led
us out of the dark forest of these present wars and confusions into
the open brotherhood of his rule.
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