CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION 25
civil power. His disciples are not to be like those that think they rule while playing the masters and doing violence to their subjects. Hereafter, in the all-changing ordering of things, greatness and dis- tinction will rest in the freedom of man who transcends himself by having God only for his master and for his neighbour one like unto himself. This was the gospel of Jesus which, without impinging upon the imperial authority, was a negation of the fundamental as- sumption of the Empire. It was a declaration of separation from the theoretical theocracy of law and from political messianism.
The new message of the coming of Heaven to earth, of the victory of the eternal in the realm of visible time, was a development of Old Testament theocracy in the spirit of its pristine purity, but added unto it was a new beholding of God and of the relationships between Him and man, His image. Thus the law was fulfilled, not abrogated. In quite the same way the historical evolution which led to cosmopolis and empire prepared soil in which there could take root a super-political religion embracing all mankind. Indeed, even the political theories entertained during the earlier stages of that evolution afterward spread like life-giving veins through the body of the Church. Much which then took form necessarily seemed a departure from the Founder's spirit, but the logic of history is not within man's power to control, nor is he permitted to give permanence to any single moment. The whole meaning of time is not isolated on the stage of the theatre nor in the scene of the play we witness. If the movement of historic life takes on logic and consecutiveness when we see that events move toward Christ no matter how violently opposed some may be to His mission, it is then also easy to look upon the fully developed Church from the vantage-point of certainty that the laws of conflict require that every progress toward higher form must be hewn out of the ma- terials of a contradiction. Though man has no freedom in the world of nature to say "Yes" and "No," he has that freedom in the moral order, which cannot be realized without his co-operation. Satan had already been judged, had been cast out into darkness, had been put in bondage by the Kingdom of Gbd and the men who established that Kingdom. Nevertheless Satan remained the prince of this world the restless antagonist of the Kingdom of God, whose dominion he continued to manifest through the very fact that he had been con-
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