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In his other work, the Acts of the Apostles, St. Luke beautifully illustrates these words of our Lord. The Book of the Acts gives us the history of the early Christian Church for about two-and-thirty years after the death of Christ. It may well surprise a thoughtful reader of this book to remark how little progress Christianity seems to have made at the end of that period, so far as the outward life of man was concerned. Nothing amounting to a great social change is here recorded. The Church had not put down heathen sacrifice, nor demolished a single idol temple. Scarcely yet did men's public and social life show any traces of it. The gospel had as yet no local habitation; in looking down upon the crowded dwellings of the great cities of the empire, you would not as yet have seen a spire. Nay, nearly three centuries elapsed after the period described in the Acts of the Apostles, before buildings gave any note of the great moral revolution which had taken place in the minds of men; before the Basilica was diverted from its original purpose as a court of justice to the great end of Christian worship, and in the semicircular recess, where the praetor and his assessors had sat to lay down the law of the empire, now the bishop and his attendant presbyters were installed around the holy table, to expound the higher law of the kingdom of heaven. But yet, though the visible impression made by Christianity upon human life and manners was thus slight during the period referred to, we may be quite sure that the gospel was then fermenting with peculiar power in the hearts and minds of men. If the kingdom of God did not come with observation, this was no proof at all that it was not within men — that it was not in the very centre of their inner life. If the powers that be, and the wise men after the flesh, at first thought it beneath their notice; if Trajan and Pliny regarded Christians merely in the light of an obstinate and eccentric set of fanatics; this was no proof that a great social revolution was not preparing in the lower strata of society, and eating away, like subterraneous volcanic fire, the crust upon which existing institutions stood. The mustard-seed had been cast into the earth, and it was swelling and bursting beneath the soil. The leaven had been thrown into human nature; and its influences, though noiseless and unseen, were subtlely and extensively diffusing themselves through the whole lump. Christ's religion was to win its way noiselessly, like Himself. Because its blows against existing institutions were so indirect, because they were aimed so completely at the inward spirit of man, the great men and the wise men after the flesh completely overlooked them, and dreamt not how they were undermining the whole social fabric of heathenism. The scanty notices of Christianity by authors contemporary with its rise have been thoughtlessly made a ground of objection against it by sceptics. The believer will rather see in this fact a confirmation of the Lord's profound word. The kingdom of God was not to come, and it did not come, with observation.

(Dean Goulburn.)

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KJV: And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation:

WEB: Being asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God would come, he answered them, "The Kingdom of God doesn't come with observation;