; on which they must or can do jobs for one another;
and it has been decisively proved that the existing demarcation and
rivalry in England is a false and needless thing; and that working
together can be a real, unselfconscious and wholly profitable matter.
Our English airs are poisoned by past history and old social cleavage:
in France, the past is forgotten, and social barriers do not exist. It
is a matter of atmosphere, and there it is clear and bracing. Nobody
sacrifices conviction or principle, but they love one another.

I do not say there may not be individual misunderstandings and frictions
now and then, but they are miraculously few. The normal temper is shewn
by the numerous meetings for conference and devotion by the various
chaplains. These are more easy to effect at the bases than in the line;
but they take place everywhere. Typical is the conduct of a small base
on the sea, where the eight chaplains or so meet regularly for devotion,
and each is entrusted with a section of the proceedings each time. For
instance, the American Episcopalian takes the Thanksgiving, the
Presbyterian the Confession, the Wesleyan the Intercession, each of the
others has found from the same chapter of, say, St Mark's Gospel, some
"seed-thought" upon which he is allowed to dilate for four minutes.
There is no constraint or self-consciousness in this gathering. Each is
perfectly happy, and so is the whole.

It is not surprising that out of such an atmosphere and among such
practices a powerful passion for unity has arisen, based on something
far stronger than sentiment, and having in it some of the fire of
revelation. It has not been sought; it has come; it has grown: nobody
expected it. It came, naturally and delightfully. The fifth year of war
will assuredly see some definite policy or action towards greater unity
proceeding from France. The quiet, unhasty, resolved manner in which
the Chaplains to the Forces in France are moving is in striking contrast
to the hasty proposals and hasty actions threatening on the less
prepared soil at home. Indeed in this last sentence I have touched upon
the two actual terrors which the Church in France feels. FIRST, that
hasty and purely _sectional_ action on unimaginative and traditional
lines by the home-clergy will give the old party-feeling a new bitter
lease of life, and by ruining unnecessarily the unity of the Church of
England will destroy the hopes that are so fair of yet wider reunion.