and unifying spiritual life that is common to all. Membership is psychical, not external, and its blessings are also spiritual. The poor in spirit[1] are to be its members; within it the mourner is to be comforted;[2] those hungry for righteousness are to be fed;[3] the poor cared for,[4] perplexed and worrying souls reassured,[5] the pure in heart to see God.[6] The Johannine conception is even more explicit. Entrance to it is dependent wholly upon a spiritual renewal,[7] and in the sonship thus obtained are the forces[8] that are to make for the complete realization of the specific ideals Jesus presents as the features of the perfect social life. In this spiritual character of the kingdom lies its energy and its practicability. Membership within it is possible for all since all are spiritual.[9] It can move not merely in organized but in unorganized ways. It can remake public opinion and social conceptions. In a word it is dynamic—a power as well as a condition. And this power lies within the new possibilities of divine sonship.
4. In its turn this points to the possibility of a beginning and progressive social order here and now. Jesus in his double revelation of God to man and humanity to man inaugurated its historical life. If consciousness of sonship is possible for men, and moral development along both individual and social lines is made possible by man's very constitution; if Jesus could speak of his immediate disciples as enjoying the blessings of the kingdom[10] and as brethren with God as their father; and if the number of these followers was to increase numerically just as their virtue might deepen; the conclusion seems unavoidable that a "divine society" is thought of by Jesus as already within the world. Its spiritual elements save it from the limbo of Utopias. True, it is not yet complete, either intensively or extensively. In its social as in its individual aspect the progress of righteousness is gradual, first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn
