The promised
land was a piece of earth. The kingdom was an historical fact. It was
not symbolically that Israel was led into captivity, or that it
returned and restored the Temple. It was not ideally that a Messiah
was to come. Memory of such events is in the same field as history;
prophecy is in the same field as natural science. Natural science too
is an account of what will happen, and under what conditions. It too
is a prophecy about destiny. Accordingly, while it is quite true that
speculations about nature and history are not contained explicitly in
the religion of the gospel, yet the message of this religion is one
which speculations about nature and reconstructions of history may
extend congruously, or may contradict and totally annul. If physical
science should remove those threats of destruction to follow upon sin
which Christian prophecy contains, or if it should prove that what
brings destruction is just that unworldly, prayerful, all-forgiving,
idle, and revolutionary attitude which the gospel enjoins, then
physical science would be incompatible with Christianity; not with
this or that text of the Bible merely, about the sun standing still or
the dead rising again, but with the whole foundation of what Christ
himself, with John the Baptist, St.
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