So
heaven, righteousness, happiness, the constituent elements of these are
right thinking, right feeling, right acting, obedience to the laws of
God, which make them possible.
We believe that God, through pain, through suffering, down through the
winding ways of darkness and ignorance, one year, a million years, must
pursue the soul of any one of his children until that child learns that
suffering follows wrong, and must follow it, and that God himself
cannot help it, and so, learning the lesson, by and by turns, comes
back, and says: Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee,
and am not worthy to be thy son: make me at least as one of thy hired
servants. And then the love that has pursued all the way, that has been
in the light and that has been in the dark, shall go out to meet him,
and fall on his neck in loving embrace, and rejoice that he who was
dead is alive again, and he who was lost is found.
This is the gospel we preach, a gospel of God's eternal, boundless
love, the good news that every human being is God's child; that here on
earth, co-operating with God and discovering his laws, we may begin the
creation of his kingdom now; that we may broaden and enlarge it until
it encloses the world; and that it reaches out into the limitless ages
of the future. And this, as I said, is the gospel of the Christ,
changed in its form, if you please, but one in its essence; for he
came, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying: The time
is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.
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