204 The First and Great Commandment
that wickedness is excluded. The soul is to make conscious
effort towards spiritual progress, towards Christlikeness
and godlikeness; and we are to work out our salvation,
with God working in us to will and to do of His good pleas-
ure. We are to seek growth in spiritual stature and power,
in order to be of more value to God in the cooperation and
service to which we are called.
The earth is to be subdued and humanized, gardens are
to be made where there are jungles, forces of destruction
are to be conquered and beneficent forces to be multiplied;
and man is the appointed instrument. Human society is
not finished; and man is the instrument under God to bring
about the unifying of humanity—in brotherhood, so that
unselfish service shall be the law between individuals and
nations, so that the City of God shall be organized and
established in peace and love and righteousness.
The Church to which souls were added on Pentecost was
an organization seeking not only the welfare of its own
members, but it was to bear witness and gather the world
to Christ; cooperating to bring the Gospel to every creature.
Its members to-day are to seek to be profitable servants of
God; not bent merely on saving themselves, but bent on
saving others. Not to cooperate to extend the Kingdom,
to stand idle in relation to what we term missionary work,
is to ignore and deny the law of service in the sphere where
its application is most needed: the sphere of human souls
where help from God is most required, where the helpers
are valuing souls in the spirit of the Divine Saviour who
came not to be ministered unto but to minister.
In human families fathers and mothers are called to do
work for God, as entrusted by the Creator with children
to be trained in heavenly citizenship, as commissioned to
hand on from generation to generation the inheritances of