--- title: Improvement Era description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930. authors: - Nelson, N. L. collections: - periodicals tags: - magazine - improvement-era periodical: Improvement Era volume: 2 number: 4 published: 1899-02 publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations publisher_place: Salt Lake City language: en type: magazine reference: 'Nelson, N. L., "Gospel Studies II: An Outward Kingdom of God Necessary to Salvation," *Improvement Era* 2, no. 4 (February 1899): 291–298.' source: url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera24unse transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers. identifier: improvementera24unse start_page: 291 end_page: 298 rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1899-02) source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera24unse publication_year: 1899 note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1899, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright. --- # Gospel Studies II: An Outward Kingdom of God Necessary to Salvation GOSPEL STUDIES. II. AN OUTWARD KINGDOM OF GOD NECESSARY TO SALVATION. BY PROFESSOR N. L. NELSON. Before proceeding to discuss the above proposition, let us by way of review try to realize more fully the meaning of its correlative, as discussed in the last number of the Era; viz: " An Inward Kingdon of God Necessary to Salvation." Suppose it should suit the purposes of the Jesuit propaganda to select one of its emissaries and give him the mission to sift the heights and depths of "Mormonism." Under the rule of the order, ''All Things for Christ," nothing would hinder his conscience from receiving baptism at the hands of our Elders. He would perhaps come and live among us, pay his tithes and offerings, attend punctiliously to his Church duties and obligations, perhaps go on a mission, if such a step would tend to open to him the doors of the Temple—in short, to live in outward seeming the life of a Latterday Saint for as long a period of time as might be necessary to accomplish his mission or demonstrate the futility of it. Whether his lamb's covering would be pulled off or not is a question that may be left to await a real case. For the purpose of this illustration, we may suppose that he so ingratiates himself that every honor and privilege of the Church are heaped upon him. He is in the Kingdom of God truly, but is he of it? No more than a wolf in the fold is a sheep, however carefully concealed in wool. The Kingdom of God is not within him, hence it cannot be without him; that is, his outward acts will not help to save him. Whether or not this case has taken place or will take place, it is evident to all of us that occasionally men unite themselves with the body of Christ for merely ulterior reasons. Though in the Church they are not of the Church. There is in fact no way for a man to become part of the Kingdom of God, save by having the Kingdom formed within him. If this thought be true in totality it must likewise be true in part. Though all members may be equally in the Kingdom they are not all equally of the Kingdom, nor is any one of the Kingdom equally day after day. Whatever part of the Kingdom is truly formed within us will be truly expressed without us. And if there be expressed outwardly some good that has not its correlative conception or conviction within, no credit toward salvation will accrue therefrom; for as observed in my last paper, salvation begins to take place in the very centre of the being, not in his external life; and consequently acts not springing out of this centre, cannot influence it for good, but may, when they are hypocritical, often influence it for bad. The Ananiases and Sapphiras of the Church, though they do not always fall dead, do not on that account escape judgment. From the foregoing it will be seen that having the " Kingdom of God within you," being "born again," passing "from death unto life," and receiving a "testimony of the Gospel" are all expressions signifying the same thing, viz: the quickening of faith within us. The examples I have adduced showing the futility of mere outward acts—acts unconnected with the heart—are only illustrations of the law that works without faith are dead; which (so far as the salvation of the doer is concerned) is quite as true a law as its converse: faith without works is dead. Now this very converse expresses in terser form the theme of the present paper; for granting that the inward Kingdom stands for faith, what is the outward Kingdom but an expression of that faith in works? Let us then proceed to trace the steps whereby the outward Kingdom results from the inward. The moment any being receives the change which is figura- tively called "the Kingdom of God within you," that moment he discovers himself out of joint with mankind. -To put it in scriptural terms, he is no longer of the world, for the Lord has chosen him out of the world. His life plans have been upset, his ideas of right and wrong changed, his ideals re-adjusted. He sees through new eyes—he is born again. It is not wonderful that the world begins to hate him, for does he not immediately manifest his hate for the world?—for the wrongs and shams that make up the warp, if not also the woof, of the world's doings? It counts for little or nothing if, by way of compensation, he manifests a love ten-fold increased for the beings that consent to these doings; that he, recently, one of them, should now turn round and despise what they hold dear—this is not to be tolerated nor lightly forgiven. Thus is the man isolated, buffeted, ostracized. It could hardly be otherwise; for he is imbued with a harmony, be it little or much, which is discord to the world. But he feels and knows that it is the true harmony, the eternal harmony of the universe, which has attuned his scul. He cannot consent, even if he had the power, to give up this sweet music of the spheres for the fragmentary melodies of the world. Whatever betide, he must suffer the worst that men can do and get balm for his wounds from above. Though in the world he has ceased to be of the world. Nor can he again be joined to the world as long as the Kingdom of God is within him. This isolation then must serve as a criterion of the true convert. If after conversion he remain wedded to the idols of his previous life, if religion merely completes the pleasures of existence, and otherwise smooths the way for his worldliness, we may well doubt whether it was the Kingdom of God which was planted in his bosom. In this day of imitations we should not be surprised to find even shoddy conversions. He certainly deserves least to be counted in the fold of Christ who rests content in the conviction that the Kingdom of God is within him and that therefore he need take no further thought of salvation; for true converts cannot be at rest in the midst of worldly environments. As Paul puts it, these count themselves "strangers and pilgrims on earth. For they that say such things, declare that they seek a country * * * a better country, that is, an heavenly." It is out of this very restlessness, this feeling on the part of the convert that he is a pilgrim, this longing for the society of beings with ideals and aspirations similar to his own, that the outward Kingdom of God grows. The law is as natural as that of gravitation. Who has not witnessed its operations and perhaps been thrilled by personal experience of it? Here at random is the voice of such a one—a young lady alone on the Isle of Wight, the only one of her family who has accepted the Gospel: "When I read in the Star today, I felt to thank our Heavenly Father from the depths of my heart that ever I had the privilege of meeting a Latter-day Saint Elder, and of being numbered as one of the people so despised. I have such a strong testimony of the truth of the Gospel, and I am glad to say that the longer I am away from our people the more intense is my desire to be amongst them again, and to be in some way useful in helping to spread the Gospel in its fullness." * Here is a girl who writes a heart-to-heart letter to her missionary friend, with no other motive than to relieve the longing for love and companionship. Her words are the voice of her soul—no artifice, no thought of the spiritual significance of what she was saying. Least of all did she dream that she was giving expression to the divine law of which I have been speaking. Yet note how perfect is the expression. She first declares that she has a strong testimony of the truth of the Gospel; in other words the Kingdom of God is strongly formed within her. Then she speaks of her intense desire, first, to unite with the Latter-day Saints, second to help spread the Gospel in its fullness ; which last two ideas embody, both in its essence and purpose, the outward Kingdom of God. Note that her testimony, or the Kingdom of God within her, and her desire, which points to the Kingdom of God without her, are related as cause and effect. It is by no means an unusual case. Every convert in the world, every missionary out of Zion, feels the same intense longing; feels it with an intensity proportionate to the fullness of the Kingdom-of-God idea within him. Let us now, before proceeding to the next division, sum up in * From a letter by Miss Jennie Brimhall in the January (1899) number of the Young Woman's Journal. brief the points made in this progress from the inward to the outward Kingdom. First, receiving of the Kingdom within (that is, a testimony of the Gospel) puts a man at cross angles with his previous bearings, the extent of his isolation depending upon the fullness of the new ideal that has taken possession of him. Second, as he now hates what the world loves, the world naturally turns round and hates him, adding persecution by way of interest. Third, cut loose from every tie of kinship and friendship, he becomes in spirit a "pilgrim seeking a better country, that is, an heavenly;" in other words, an outward Kingdom that shall not jar with his inward Kingdom. It is really heaven that he is seeking; but heaven, it must be remembered, is a relative term. It means a place where the laws of God are obeyed. The nearest approach to heaven on this earth is the Church or Kingdom of God. He will never be "at home" or comfortable until he reaches that degree of heaven, or the outward Kingdom, which the ideal or inward Kingdom fits him for; that is, he will never be at ease in a system of order or harmony either much above or much below the order and harmony that is within him. Now as there could never be salvation where there is unrest, I think that I have proved that an outward Kingdom of God, being necessary to happiness, must be necessary to salvation. But there is another side to this question. Suppose there were on earth no outward Kingdom with which to unite, what would become of those in whom the Kingdom had been planted by the Spirit? Granting that they would remain true to their "first love," there would be no spiritual life for them save that of hermits, and this, too, even though they lived in the heart of the most populous city on earth. I have often wondered if this spiritual isolation did not, at a time when the Kingdom of God was taken from the earth, first induce that migration of holy men to deserts and lonely places, which at length became the reproach of human intelligence. Who shall say? It would not be the first instance of things opposite in character yet alike in outward seeming. But returning to the first question, if there were no outward Kingdom with which converts might unite, would men retain their heaven-bestowed ideals, that is, keep themselves apart from the world; or, granting that some would keep alive within them the glimpse given them of the Kingdom of God, would they without an outward Kingdom advance beyond that first glimpse and get a higher ideal ? This question brings us fairly to the next division of my theme; viz: an outward Kingdom is necessary to keep alive and make progressive the inward Kingdom; and therefore of course necessary to salvation. Consider for a moment what would have happened to Cornelius and his family, if, after having had the Kingdom of God formed within them, they had refused to obey Peter's command to unite themselves with the outward Kingdom. Yet such things occur in the experience of every Elder. I am convinced that for every person that accepted the Gospel under my administration there were a hundred in whose bosoms the Spirit had planted the Kingdom of God; but their testimonies were transitory, lasting only long enough for them to make the act of will which, to say the least, postpones indefinitely their day of grace. Many of those whose testimonies are worked into the reality of fact, fall—more's the pity—back into the ways of the world; but all who receive of the Spirit yet do nothing, fall away. The image of the Kingdom which the Spirit impresses upon their hearts may be likened to that image which the sun prints upon the "proof" paper of the photographer. If ''developed" by further work, it remains "fixed" for all time; but if left as first impressed, it gradually fades into a black indistinguishable surface comparable to nothing so much as the mental and spiritual confusion out of which mobocracy grows. A Kingdom in the heart is not possible for very long without the corresponding outward Kingdom of noble thoughts wrought out in deeds. Faith when not immediately followed by works lives only an ephemeral life. The outward Kingdom of God is necessary to salvation, (1) for the rest and happiness of him in whom the inward Kingdom had been formed; (2) for the fixing of that inward Kingdom; (3) for the progressive growth and enlargement of that inner Kingdom; and (4) for the extension of that Kingdom to others. The first two ideas have been already discussed, we proceed therefore to the third. Man is not fitted to advance by isolation. A hermit life can help no one. For he who has the inner force to profit by a life of contemplation has already enough power of introspection and needs to be developed in the lines of action, while he who has not enough inner force to keep his mind active in a hermit's cell, though he might profit by a few years of silent thinking, cannot be trusted to develop this power by himself. Isolation to him would mean mental atrophy. Man therefore needs society—needs it first to knock off the rough corners and polish his exterior self. The smooth, round stone on the beach was once a rugged fragment broken from some shelving cliff on the mountain. Its angles would never have disappeared had it not dropped into the stream and been jostled and tossed a million times on its way towards its destination. Granting that the bed of the river and the water may stand for nature's share in the fashioning of man, the ten thousand similar stones going down the stream together must stand for the influence of society upon him. But there is something besides—viz: the development of the inner life of man—which my illustration fails to show; unless indeed some agency could be supposed acting upon the unorganized particles of the stone, so adjusting them that instead of the dull gray and brown and red of river rock, we should have pure crystal and sparkling diamond. Even this agency, however, though it comes direct from God, is largely dependent upon the efforts of man with his fellow-man. No one will deny that if this crude conglomeration of conflicting sins and weaknesses which we denominate our inner life, is to be attuned and harmonized it must be done by the Spirit of God; but who shall labor with the sinner so that he will consent to admit this regenerating power? Who shall go to him when darkness and doubt have almost shut his heart against heaven? Man's upward growth is "from faith to faith." The Spirit is ever ready to put into his heart a more perfect Kingdom of God—when he shall have realized in deed the one first given him. But who shall urge him on to renewed effort, when he has come almost to a stand-still? On every side man needs the correcting, the supporting, the inspiring arm of society. What society? Not the guilds and combinations among mankind that pass under this name; though these are better for the upbuilding of the race than the isolation of the hermit. I refer to an ideal society—heaven's ideal for earth—the Church or Kingdom 298 • of God. In theory this society is fitted perfectly to give men joy in this life, and prepare them for joy in eternity; prepare them by correcting evil tendencies, eradicating sins, strengthening weaknesses and keeping the mind in that state of humility whereby the spirit can enter and adjust the inner life to the harmony of the universe. Practically it fails to do these things—at least in part; but it is not because of defect in the organization of the society; failure comes when it does come, not from faulty laws, but from faulty execution. Paul recognized regeneration as the supreme function of the Church, which he said was for the "perfecting of the Saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." And that man can never attain this fullness outside the Church, is abundantly proved not only by the foregoing discussion, but by the whole tenor of New Testament Scripture. That the Kingdom is in imperfect hands, counts nothing against its divine functions; it is the best—the only society fitted to nurture and develop to glorious realization the Kingdom of God as planted in the human heart. What then shall be said of those who, persuaded that the Kingdom of God is an inner Kingdom, which at some camp-meeting or revival was planted in them, deny the efficacy of an outward Kingdom and refuse to unite with it? Only this, that of all cunning and fatal delusions invented by the evil one, they are in the meshes of the worst—worst because it seems to promise them the greatest security.