time: the refreshing river 



(These terrors then, this darkness of the mind, 

 Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light. 

 Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse, 

 But only Nature's aspect and her law.) 



The path lay open now towards a surer freedom, if first necessity 

 could be understood. Amid such vast changes of intellectual climate, 

 it is not surprising that the function of the clerk should both change 

 and yet remain the same. 



The Concept of the Kingdom. 



The concept of the Kingdom is of such importance for every 

 aspect of the relations between Christianity and communism that I 

 must amplify a little what I said above about the forms which it has 

 taken in christian thought. We may divide the logical possibilities 

 into four. The Kingdom of God has been thought to exist; 



(i) Here and now; 



(2) Here but not yet; 



(3) Not here but now already; 



(4) Not here and not yet. 



Clearly the most fundamental distinction lies between those who 

 have looked for the Kingdom on earth, whether now or in the future, 

 and those who have interpreted it as meaning an essentially invisible 

 and other-worldly state. The extremest division lies between the 

 second and third alternatives. 



The early Church, which for this purpose must be taken as meaning 

 up to the end of the 3rd century in the east and the end of the 4th 

 in the west, was almost wholly devoted to the second of these inter- 

 pretations. It was believed that the second coming of the Lord, 

 which was thought to be imminent, would inaugurate a visible reign 

 of complete righteousness, in which the saints would administer, 

 until the last judgment, a society based on love and justice. This 

 doctrine, known to theologians as millenniarism, chiliasm, or "realistic 

 eschatology," found its canonical authority largely in the Apocalypse 

 of John, and its intellectual defenders in such men as Cyprian, Justin, 

 Irenaeus and Tertullian. It was attacked, as time went on, by three 

 principal factors. First, there was the necessity of adapting the pro- 

 phetic vision of a world made new to a world in which the expected 

 leader did not return. Secondly, there was the influence of Hellenistic 



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