ABSTRACT
It is essentially supernatural. It is based on the two Commandments with their threefold reference, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy mind, with all thy soul and with all thy strength : and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” It is life in three dimensions—God, neighbour, self ; time, space and eternity ; the King, the Kingdom and the citizen. This is in striking contrast with naturalism, which is always two-dimensional—Time and space, self and neighbour, Capital and Labour, birth and death, life confined between the cradle and the grave. This life in terms of a naturalism which eliminates the divine is not true human life as it is known to us in experience. It is sub-human. It is a mere scientific abstraction, quite legitimate, nay essential, for the purposes of study. The disaster is when the truth of this scientific abstraction is mistaken for the truth of the Whole. The Classical Political Economists made an abstraction of man as a money-making animal and created a soulless beast, the Economic Man. The naturalistic history of the world begins in gas and ends in gas ; for it all life is but a cry of pain which breaks an eternity of senseless silence. Mr. Wells does not begin at the beginning in his History of the World. The man who seeks his origin in incandescent gas is like the “forced ” chicken 37which addressed the incubator as “Mother darling.” Feeling is antecedent to Thought, and the life of man begins in the heart of God. “In the beginning was the Word.” So we find that there are two ways of organizing the life of man. The first is the Kingdom of God, which is three-dimensional, in which both the individual and the corporate life is referred to God, and draws from Him its authority and limitations. The second is the Kingdom of the Beast, as it is called in the Revelation of S. John, or the “World” in its bad sense, as it is called in S. John’s Epistles, the “World” meaning society as it organizes itself apart from God, a scheme which is two-dimensional, concerned only with man and his neighbour in time and space. The foundation of the first is spiritual and eternal, the love of God enthroned on Righteousness, Justice, Faith and Freedom, and issuing in a Divine and Human Fellowship, the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit. The foundation of the second is material and secular. It deals with man’s life on earth in a closed, mechanical, determined universe from which the supernatural has been carefully excluded.
