Christendom becomes now the imperious vocation of every
Christian, the one preventive of our agony and loss going to waste, the
one hope of a loveless world, the clear next objective of the Church of
the living God.

Before returning to the idea of the Dominance of Love, and a
consideration of first steps towards it, let us go back to France, and
watch the relations of the various communions there one to another after
four years of war.

It is new and rather hard to describe. The first few months, when the
Chaplains to the Forces of the various denominations arrived with their
inherited home suspicions one of another, presented many difficulties
that might have increased ill-feeling. An army regulation which allows
the Church of England chaplain only to minister to Church of England
men, and the Roman Catholic to Roman Catholic men, etc., reduced the
chances of such conflict; and at the same time, the vastness and
urgency of the work the chaplains had to do swallowed up all other
thoughts. As a writer in _The Church in the Furnace_ said, "We have
heard with mingled irritation and amusement that good folk at home have
been exercised because an undue proportion of men of this party or that
have been sent out; the question out here is not 'To what party does he
belong?' but 'Is he capable by character and life of influencing men for
good, and winning them for God and His Church?'" Again, the extremely
free use of the Prayer Book and of any and every sort of devotion, at
any and every hour of day and night, has broken up all prejudiced
rigidity of use. Methods that did not help were dropped; methods that
helped men were welcome, from whatever source they came.

So arose a great harmony, a harmony of energy and experiment; and
although in religious matters the Roman Catholics retained their
aloofness, the drawing together of other denominations, as represented
by their clergy, has been constant and perfectly natural and
unsuspicious. United services have not been common; each denomination
has confined itself loyally to its own men; what the statements in the
Lower House of Convocation meant to the effect that the amount of
intercommunion going on at the Front would shock members of that house,
no chaplain has any idea. But the new, fresh, and delightful thing is,
the absolute lack of feeling between, say, the Catholic Anglican and the
Congregationalist. There are numerous occasions on which they must or
can work together