Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication Volume 253 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III FURTHER FEATURES OF THE KINGDOM We shall get further light on the nature of the Kingdom of God, if we now approach it from a different angle. It is a Kingdom in which men have not only got rid of self-regard, but in which they take seriously the brotherhood of man. The phrase which Jesus instinctively used to describe another man was always "Thy brother." It was for Him one and the same thing to teach men that God was their Father and to teach that all of them were brethren. His own attitude was really well described by saying, "He was not ashamed to call them brethren." But while it is the case that the two truthsthe Fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man are really one and the same truth looked at from different sides, it is not true that men inevitably receive them together. It is a congenial thing to most people to believe that God is their Father, and often it is a very uncongenial thing to believe that all other men are their brethren. It is possible to have a great deal of emotional pleasure in the fact that we have a Father in heaven who loves us, andyet at the same time to deny in thought and action our brotherhood with other classes and races than our own. The brotherhood of man in fact turns out to be of all truths the most revolutionary, and for the drastic changes which would come with its recognition many devout persons are not at all ready. For the Jews of Christ's time mankind consisted of two utterly different groupsJews, who were the favoured of God, and Gentiles, who were outsiders. For the Greeks the two groups were Greeks, and all the otherscomprehensively labelled "barbarians." For Romans, the groups were Roman citizens, and the rest. Further, all over the world men were divided into the free and the slaves, and so different wa...