tianity alone is split into hundreds of denominations. The
fact is its own grim condemnation. We had lost even the sense that
division mattered. It is quite ridiculous to pretend that nothing is
wrong with the religious ideas or state of a race, which produces
hundreds of bodies, big and small, to worship Him who only asked that
His worshippers should be ONE. Denomination itself has become a word of
shame which we shall not be able to use much longer. It brings up at
once the thought of something partial, little, far less than the Body
for which Christ died; and a host of yet more horrid pictures of old
squabbles and present rivalries, of contempt and bitterness and
controversy. It does not suggest one _Christian_ idea at all.

These uneasy thoughts even before the war were brought home by the
practical results of disunion as worked out inevitably in the colonies
and mission field. The language is not too strong that labels them
monstrous. Here was the flower of our Christian devotion going forth to
heathen wilds, meeting by God's grace with wide success; and
establishing our little local denominations firmly in the nations,
tribes, and islands of Asia, Africa, and Australasia; rendering it hard
for a native Christian who moves from his home to get elsewhere the
accustomed ministries and means of grace vital to his young faith;
planting seeds of future quarrel at the very birth of new tribes into
the Prince of Peace. In the Dominions, with their thin and widely
scattered populations, other phenomena, equally deplorable, are
manifest--five churches in places where one suffices, appalling waste of
effort and money, and even ugly competition for adherents.

In England we hardly saw these things. The population was large enough
and indifferent enough to God to provide room for the activities of all.
The indifference indeed seemed to be growing. We did not stop to think
whether disgust at continuous controversy had not done much to cause
that indifference--how far our divisions simply manufactured scepticism
as to there being any religious truth--whether the obvious lovelessness
of such conditions was likely to recommend the religion of Love--whether
this disparate chaos was likely to be a field in which the Lord, who
designed and founded one brotherhood of believers, could work or give
His grace to the uttermost. No, the Christianity of our Christians has
tended to be a thin individual thing, with interests scarcely extende