not inaptly called the Church of the first-born,— the Church of Christ. "Your father Abraham," said the Saviour, "rejoiced to see my day." My day? Yes. For Christ is but another name for righteousness, of which He was the great example and inspirer. The Church then,-the true Church, the Christian Church, the Church of God, the one eternal and universal Church,consists of those who are written in heaven because they have worked righteousness on earth. Of this eternal and universal Church, it is manifest, temporary and local churches-such as those of England, of Scotland, even of Rome— can form at the best but parts. They cannot in the nature of things be more.

Well then, you say, what becomes of the distinction between a church and a sect? Does that still hold good? I think it does. I will tell you why. I suppose that the narrowest of the Churches is wider than the broadest of the sects. It is not the holding of certain tenets which makes a sect. For most of the tenets of the sects have been held by members of one or other of the Churches. A sect only arises when persons

separate themselves from communion with their Church. It is not the tenets, but isolation on account of the tenets, which constitutes sectarianism. And this isolation shows that an exaggerated and utterly false importance is attached by the schismatics to their own special beliefs. In comparison with righteousness other things are unimportant. And upon the whole I venture to affirm, that the Churches of Christendom have come far nearer than the sects to the realisation of this fundamental truth. I don't mean to say, of course, that our dissenting friends are not personally as good as we are. For anything I know to the contrary they may be better. But as dissenters they exist, not to emphasise the importance of righteousness, but to emphasise the importance of something else,-agreement in regard to which is made a sine quá non for membership. Exclusiveness is implied in the very idea of a sect. The Churches may not be sufficiently wide; but the sects are formed on purpose to be narrow.

In common honesty, however, I am bound to admit that the Churches of Christendom, though

less narrow than the sects, are far from having attained that breadth of sympathy which should belong to them as parts of the Church of Christ. There is not one of them which has fully realised the divine ideal. The Church of England, it seems to me for reasons which I will hereafter explain, is slowly struggling towards it. In the meantime I would warn you that there are persons in your Church but not of it, whose chief desire is to degrade it into a sect. At heart they are not Churchmen but Dissenters. Every prosecution for heresy, every prosecution for ritualism, is a deliberate attempt to sectarianise your Church. In all such prosecutions the doctrines and ceremonies of men are made of more importance than the righteousness of God.

The strangest part of it all is, that the prosecutors flatter themselves they believe in the teaching of Christ. Yet if Christ were here He would say now, just what He said two thousand years ago; and He would say it with infinite sorrow, that men had not yet learnt the lesson. The disciples, you remember, complained,"Master, we saw one casting out devils in Thy

name, and he followeth not us; and we forbad him, because he followeth not us." But Jesus said, "Forbid him not: for he that is not against us is on our part. Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were cast into the sea. It must needs be that offences come, but woe unto that man through whom the offence cometh."

What could be more plain? And yet men are still hankering after uniformity. When will they learn to be content with unity? When will they learn that unity does not involve uniformity, that the highest unity manifests itself in diversity? The lesson seems a simple one to those who have mastered it. But it is a lesson which was never quickly learned. And here, as elsewhere, the truth is first discovered in the

physical sphere. Those who are acquainted

with modern science are aware that the infinite variety of Nature is perfectly compatible with her unity. There was a time, however, when unity and diversity were thought to be incom

patible. In early ages the world seemed a chaos. Thousands and tens of thousands of conflicting agents were supposed to be at work in the production of natural phenomena. The woods appertained to one set of deities-the dryades; the mountains to another set-the oreades. Every star, every planet, was believed to possess a moving principle peculiar to itself. Storms and earthquakes, pestilences and eclipses, were thought to be the work of a variety of beings, who were guided by all sorts of different motives, and whose future action it was absolutely impossible to predict. The variety in nature prevented men even from imagining the unity of God. The history of science records the gradual discovery in this primeval chaos of the unifying principle of Law. Over and over again, phenomena that seemed altogether dissimilar have turned out to be merely different operations of one and the selfsame force. The apple which falls to the ground once seemed to have nothing in common with the moon which does not so fall. But now we know that both are equally under the control of gravity; that the