Southern Christian Advocate

THY KINGDOM COME.

'Thy kingdom come!' Have you not often, my brethren, pronounced these words, or heard them pronounced, without their conveying to your minds a distinct idea, or awakening a feeling in your hearts, and consequently, without their being realized as a prayer? The majority of persons see in this expression the kingdom or reign, of God, nothing in common with our present life; and if they attach to it an idea at all, it is entirely comprised in a future existence. In other terms, the kingdom of God, in the view of many persons, is heaven, and most frequently a heaven quite different from that of which the Bible speaks, a heaven created by their own imaginations, a heaven whose joys and glories are of man's invention. joys and glories in which all, without distinction, whatever may have been the nature of their faith and hopes, whatever their sentiments and their life, will participate after death! Oh! how many immortal souls have been rocked to sleep, even to the tomb, in these fatal illusions, which left them devoted to the world, its interests its joys, and its sins, while notwithstanding, they cherished the hope of this false heaven which they had created for themselves!

"Only let us be sincere in pronouncing this petition; let us be sincere, and let us not dare to ask God with our lips, to come and assume in our hearts the place of idols which we still secretly cherish! Let us fear to say to God, 'Thy kingdom come!' so long as we feel a secret apprehension lest our prayer should be heard- so long as we are willing to concede to the world, sin, and our own egotism, the dominion over us. Let us not seek to combine the service of two masters; it is impossible. God will never consent to share a throne with idols; to pretend to it would be to insult him! It would be to run the risk of raising up insuperable barriers to his work in us! It would be to wish to perpetuate in our souls trouble and anguish; on the one hand, conscience would claim us for the kingdom of God; on the other, the world, sin, our passions, and the fear of man, would claim us for the bondage of this earth, and our life would be but a continual struggle. Let your own experience bear witness to this truth. -A. Bonnet.