It is at this point that we meet that other aspect of our Lord’s preaching of the Kingdom, its eschatological tendency and its preoccupation with the end of the world and the Judgment. The present Kingdom of God, because it is essentially unfinished, points beyond itself to that consummation, when all tares shall be removed and when the Kingdom of God shall appear in all purity as the newly perfected Kingdom of those loving souls who in the Name of Jesus have fed the hungry and given drink to the thirsty.

When Jesus employs the phrase “Kingdom of God” in its full meaning, He is thinking of this future Kingdom wherein God’s rule is perfected. The beatitudes speak of this future Kingdom, and so does the prayer of the Paternoster, “Thy Kingdom come.” In many of His parables and in explicit promises He directs the hearts and minds of His disciples to this great thing that is to come. Let your loins be girt, let your lamps be ready in your hands, the bridegroom cometh! This hope gives His message an immense power to enkindle and stir men’s souls. It allows no easy acquiescence in the present, but requires us to be ever up and stirring, ready for the great hour. Now, that our Lord’s teaching, on its eschatological side, culminated in this emphasis on the future Kingdom and the Judgment, cannot be seriously debated. But it is a far harder matter to determine from the Gospels His exact conception of the coming of the Last Day. Did he conceive it as an abrupt and catastrophic event, or as the gradual development of divine destructive forces which effected the Judgment in their process?

But one thing is certain, that Jesus taught plainly that the Kingdom which He had established in the immediate present was as yet embryonic, the least of all seeds, a tiny leaven, and that it was to pass from this embryonic state into full life and strength only after His death and because of His death, by a wondrous interposition of God. “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself” (Jn. xii, 32). Not only St. Paul, but the Evangelists also know of our Lord’s promise that after His death a great new thing was to happen, the visitation of the disciples by the Holy Ghost, “by the power from on high,” as St. Luke says (xxiv, 49), by the “Consoler,” as St. John calls Him. It is the plain conviction of early Christianity that this promise was fulfilled in the “mighty wind” of Pentecost, and that the small, embryonic Kingdom of God was then first awakened into full and fruitful life, into a life that was to fill the whole world.