What is the hope held out today by the orthodox and unimaginative theologians? That at some distant date, known only to the inscrutable will of God the Father, Christ will issue forth from His seat at the right hand of God, and (followed by His angels and by the Church invisible) descending upon the clouds of Heaven, to the sound of a trumpet, He will make an appearance in [65] Jerusalem. The battle raging at that time will then end, and He will enter the city of Jerusalem to rule for one thousand years. During this millennium, Satan or the principle of evil will be bound or imprisoned, and there will be a new heaven and new earth. Further than that, we are told nothing; humanity hopes for so much more that the picture presented does not intrigue them.

There are those today on Earth who know that through the instrumentality, the inspiration and the instruction of those sons of men who have wrought out their divinity in the crucible of daily human living the Kingdom of God will come into being; these Knowers now work actively, under the direct impression of the Christ, in leading [66] humanity from darkness to light and from death to immortality.

These are the great underlying truths which are distinctive of the Christ, of the Buddha, and of the Church of God, as it expresses itself in the East and in the West; these are the only truths which matter. In the future, the eyes of humanity will be fixed upon Christ and not upon any such man-made institutions as the Church and its dignitaries; Christ will be seen as He is in reality, working through His disciples, through the Masters of the Wisdom and through His followers who toil unseen (and usually unrecognized) behind world affairs. The sphere of His activity will be known to be the human heart and also the crowded market places of the world, but not some stone edifice and not the pomp and ceremony of any ecclesiastical headquarters.

His reappearance is conditioned and determined by the reaction of humanity itself; by that reaction He must abide. His work is subject also to certain phases of [67] spiritual and cyclic timing and to impressions from sources to be found on higher levels than those upon which He normally works. Just as human affairs have effects upon His action, so great "determinations" and "profound settlements within the will of God" also have their effects. The human side or nature of the Christ, perfected and sensitive, responds to the invocation and to the appeal of men; His divine side or nature is equally responsive to the impact of energies, issuing from "the center where the will of God is known." Between these two, He has to make adjustment and bring about right timing. The bringing of good out of human so-called evil is no easy task; the vision of the Christ is so vast and His grasp of the Law of Cause and Effect, of Action and Reaction is such that the arriving at right decision as to activity and time is no simple one. Human beings are apt to look at all that happens, or that could happen, from the purely human and immediate angle; they have little understanding of the problems, decisions and implications with which Christ is today faced. In these, His pledged disciples share. Their task is to develop "the mind that is in Christ" and as they do so, they will help make clear the way for "the coming of His feet," as the Bible puts it (Heb., XII, 13.) Seeing life and events in the light of the spiritual values, as He does, will facilitate the giving out of the new teaching and will provide the skeleton structure of the new world religion, thus giving us a fresh view of divine intention and a living insight into the minds of Those Who implement the divine will and are the engineers of humanity's future. Let us, therefore, try and appreciate not only the opportunity which Christ has to help us (which is the usual presentation), but let us look also at the crises and problems with which He is confronted as He faces the work which He must do. [68]