President's Offit* 
 
 Is Christianity Impracticable? 
 
 BY 
 
 W. EVANS DARBY, LL.D. 
 
 We are told it is. The great number of Church 
 members, including their leaders, some of the most 
 prominent, tell us that it was not only impracticable 
 but impossible for us as a nation to do other than we 
 have. War, they say, is most wicked : but this war is 
 righteous because we are engaged in it, and we are right 
 because we could not help ourselves. We were com- 
 pelled. War is futile and ferocious, they admit — " the 
 most futile and ferocious of human follies," as Secretary 
 John Hay called it ; but this war was unavoidable, 
 made necessary for us by the wickedness of others. Tell 
 them that wrong is never necessary for moral beings, 
 that the wrong doing of others cannot force itself 
 upon us as right, and that the will of others can never 
 turn wrong into right for us : that each one is responsible 
 for his own moral code, and they will fly off at a tangent 
 and become obstinately contradictory. AVar is not 
 Christian, they admit, but " this war " is an exception. 
 We could not help ourselves, and then, as the newest 
 neophyte intimates, war is a sacred sacramental divine 
 thing, for it involves the principle of self -giving, which is 
 the essence of all true religion. Then, if they arc pressed 
 still further, they fall back upon the " blessed word " 
 righteousness ; and if you ask them what they mean 
 by that, they look at you with horror and exclaim, 
 " Righteousness ! Why obedience to the ' Eternal Law 
 of Righteousness,' " which, as the late R. W. Dale 
 
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 taught, though eternal is not God or the will of God, but 
 something to which God Himself is subject. So you are 
 left in the presence of that eternal entity which is not 
 God, but something to which He is subject, and with 
 the implication that the Christian ideal is sometimes 
 impossible and the Christian ethic impracticable. We 
 do not wonder that those who accept that position, 
 whether they profess and call themselves Christian or not, 
 should begin to talk of "a second best" and a necessary 
 •• diluted Christianity," and that even "Brotherhood," 
 subject to its paralysis, should become an approver and 
 then an active recruiter for the organised fratricide 
 called war, and that in the minds of many the doubt 
 arises whether after all the Christian ideal may not be an 
 impracticable faith for all times and circumstances. (It 
 is really painful to listen to what " Christian " men and 
 women are saying all around us. How then does the 
 matter really stand ? j 
 
 J. Baldwin Brown, a Christian teacher of the last 
 generation, too soon forgotten among us, discussing the 
 injunction, " Bear ye one another's burdens," 
 says : — 
 
 " The one hope of human society lies in the working of this 
 ' law of Clirist ' through all its spheres. We may call the hope 
 Utopian if we will ; though what right have we to speak of any 
 great hope for man as Utopian, since the Kingdom of Heaven 
 wos visibly set up in our world ? The welfare of the great human 
 commonwealth, the fulfilment of the hope which has lit the sad 
 march of the human generations from the beginning, hangs on 
 the response which man is prepared to offer to the exhortation, 
 ' Let this mind be in you which was also in Clirist Jesus ' [which 
 is the true brotherhood]. If the world will have the mind of 
 Christ to govern it, man's life on earth may be noble and blessed, 
 as life is noble and blessed on high. If the world will not have the 
 mind of Christ to govern it, it must go reeling on in its blindness 
 and wretchedness, until a new deluge sweeps down to purify it, 
 or a flasliing bolt strikes it into the abyss." 
 
 This was written some thirty years before this terrible 
 deluge of war which is sweeping over all lands, the full 
 extent of the destruction and desolation of which is not 
 yet visible. But, he continued, 
 
 " The exhortation which St. Paul addressed to the little com- 
 pany ' called saints ' — that is, to the men and women who had 
 
come out fromjthe beliefs, habits, and objects of the society 
 around them, to live after a higher pattern — is God's exhorta- 
 tion to the great world at large. If society is to be saved, it 
 must be transformed into a Church ; not altogether the kind 
 of thing which we know by the name, but a society ruled by the 
 Mind, and inspired by the Spirit of the Lord Jesus. Church 
 and world are one in the far vision of the heavenly watches ; 
 they see beyond the weltering confusion from which earth's most 
 earnest watchers are prone to turn with sad and sickened hearts, 
 an earthly Kingdom of Heaven. ' Thy people also shall be all 
 righteous,' was said of some far-off future of our world.' " 
 
 ( That dream of " an earthly Kingdom of Heaven," 
 is a delusion and a mockery, is it not \ It would 
 almost seem so, when its missionaries and evangelists 
 accept this awful caricature and disappointing sub- 
 stitute of world-wide war with enthusiasm, and, for 
 the moment at any rate, accommodate themselves to 
 its demands and submit to its dominance. And yet 
 is not that same " earthly Kingdom of Heaven '•' 
 the. universal hope of Christendom ? From an innumer- 
 able company of souls, from an immense number of 
 congregations and communities, the incessant divinely 
 taught prayer ascends, " Our Father which art in 
 Heaven, . . . thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on 
 earth as it is in Heaven." Is it a universal lie then — a 
 mere conventional form of worship without meaning ? 
 Did the great Father teach men, His offspring, to ask 
 for what could not be, and that, therefore, He never 
 meant to give ? Are not all these multitudes sincere ? 
 And if not all, then what of those who are, to whom it is 
 the very soul of hope and the very breath of longing ? 
 Will you tell them it is impracticable ? They know 
 better. But, says Mr. Brown again concerning it — 
 
 " We pray for the coming of the Kingdom. Worldly men 
 say ' Thy Kingdom come ' with a vague feeling that the words 
 mean some great blessing to mankind. The prayer means just 
 this. Let the same mind be in the world which was also in Christ 
 Jesus. There is no Kingdom of God anywhere which is other 
 than the reign of the Mind of Christ. All progress is illusion, 
 a mirage, a shimmer of glittering sand which does not enshrine 
 more purely the Mind of Christ — self-denial, self-sacrifice, and 
 Divine charity — in the inmost heart of mankind." 
 
 This is the hope of the future, the charter of the 
 Divine Kingdom, the prayer and pledge and certainty of 
 
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 the ending of war and the coming of permanent and 
 imi\ ersal Peace. 
 
 " When ye pray, say . . . Thy Kingdom come. Thy 
 will be done." But the Kingdom is already here in 
 germ, and actuality, and potentiality. What is needed 
 now is the recognised presence of the King. And 
 that has yet to come. To express it in the precision of 
 our western speech, what is needed is the recognition, 
 the perception of His presence, for He, too, is already 
 here, or the Kingdom could not be in any sense 
 He is here, as He said, with us, all the days, even to the 
 end. the consuimnation, of the Age. He is here, but He is 
 coming : the paradox must surely mean, coming, in the 
 recognition of His presence and authority. For were He 
 to come again only as an actual visible man arrayed in 
 flesh, who would know Him ? Men knew Him not when 
 once He came. " He came to His own, and His own 
 received Him not." Would they know Him any better, 
 would they welcome Him any more, now ? I trow not. 
 Wha t is needed is the perception of His personal presence 
 and such recognition as will result in the doing of His 
 will. It will be the next stage in the evolution of 
 mankind ; and for that we pray, and watch, and 
 wait. 
 
 Even so, come Lord Jesus, come quickly. 
 
 Peace Society, 47, New Broad Street, London, E.C. 
 
 Wboithmmbr, Lea & Co., Printeri. Cliftnu House, Womuip Street. B.C. 
 Telephone: 3121 London WaM.