Page:Three Thousand Selected Quotations from Brilliant Writers.djvu/277

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GOD'S KINGDOM—LOVE.
269

The kingdom of God which is within us consists in our willing whatever God wills, always, in every thing, and without reservation; and thus His kingdom comes; for His will is then done as it is in heaven, since we will nothing but what is dictated by His sovereign pleasure.

Fenelon.


Were it not well, then, to begin with the substance, to learn to apprehend the reality of that kingdom which is all around us now, whether we recognize it or not,—to take our aims and endeavors into it, that they may be made part of it, however small,—to surrender ourselves to it, that our lives may do something towards its advancement, and that we may become fellow-workers, however humble, with all the wise and good who have gone before us, and with Him who made them what they are?


If you want to work for the kingdom of God, and to bring it, and enter into it, there is just one condition to be first accepted. You must enter into it as children, or not at all.


The only way to hasten the kingdom is to hasten growth; to hasten work, and that, too, along the very lines in which the "resounding loom of time" is weaving in its various-colored threads.


But I am unable to reach the lofty theme;—yet I do not think that the smallest fish that swims in the boundless ocean ever complains of the immeasurable vastness of the deep. So it is with me, I can plunge with my puny capacity, into a subject, the immensity of which I shall never be able fully to comprehend.