ights and
injuries?

Is this the kind of picture which the Lord Jesus has drawn of His Flock,
His Church as He wishes, and intends, that it should be: is this what He
promises that it shall be?

Christ made His Church one at the beginning: the rulers He set over it
"were all with one accord in one place"; "the multitude of them that
believed were of one heart and of one soul." And when the Gentiles had
been brought in, what care did the Apostles take lest the new departure
should cause a separation along a line made obsolete by the Cross of
Christ; and with what adoring admiration does St Paul gaze at the
delightful spectacle of Jew and Gentile made one new man in Christ
Jesus--"where," he cries, "there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision
and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman, but Christ is
all, and in all."

In matters of rank and race and colour all our denominations retain this
Apostolic Catholicity. How inconsistent to maintain it there, and
repudiate it when we come to such differences as mostly separate us!
These are differences far more of temper than of creed, or even of
worship or government. We say, sometimes, that we are "one in spirit":
not so; it is just in spirit that we have been divided. In creed and
organisation both, and in temper as well, the Church of Apostolic times
was visibly one. "See how these Christians love one another" was the
comment of the heathen onlooker. This state of things continued for a
long time. Gibbon enumerates the Church's "unity and discipline," which
go together, as among the "secondary causes" of that wonderful spread of
the Gospel in the first three centuries.

The revived, broadened, and more candid study, alike of the New
Testament and of Church History throughout its entire course, is one of
the ways in which the Good Shepherd has been leading us to see alike the
disobedience of our divisions, and the small foundation there is for
many of the points over which we have been fighting.

Happily too, we do not now need to argue in favour of visible and
organic unity. "The once popular apologies for separation which asserted
the sufficiency of 'spiritual' union, and the stimulating virtues of
rivalry and competition, have become obsolete."

More happily still, we have learned practically to appreciate the
difference between our Saviour's gentle I must lead ([Greek: dei me
agagein]) and our forefathers' various attempts to produce "uniformity"
by d