and faith, eludes the scalpel and the
microscope. Of man in his complex nature it is true that 'clouds and
darkness are round about him,' and we may expect an equally solemn
mystery to rest upon that which makes out of separate individuals one
living body, animated with the life and moved by the Spirit of the
indwelling Christ. We can get no further back, and dig no deeper
down, than His own words, 'I am ... the life.'

But, though this unity is mysterious, it is most real. Every
Christian soul receives from Christ the life of Christ. There is a
real implantation of a higher nature which has nothing to do with sin
and is alien from death. There is a true regeneration which is
supernatural, and which makes all who possess it one, in the measure
of their possession, as truly as all the leaves on a tree are one
because fed by the same sap, or all the members in the natural body
are one, because nourished by the same blood. So the true bond of
Christian unity lies in the common participation of the one Lord, and
the real Christian unity is a unity of derived life.

The misery and sin of the Christian Church have been, and are, that
it has sought to substitute other bonds of unity. The whole weary
history of the divisions and alienations between Christians has
surely sufficiently, and more than sufficiently, shown the failure of
the attempts to base Christian oneness upon uniformity of opinion, or
of ritual, or of purpose. The difference between the real unity, and
these spurious attempts after it, is the difference between bundles
of faggots, dead and held together by a cord, and a living tree
lifting its multitudinous foliage towards the heavens. The bundle of
faggots may be held together in some sort of imperfect union, but is
no exhibition of unity. If visible churches must be based on some
kind of agreement, they can never cover the same ground as that of
'the body of Christ.'

That oneness is independent of our organisations, and even of our
will, since it comes from the common possession of a common life. Its
enemies are not divergent opinions or forms, but the evil tempers and
dispositions which impede, or prevent, the flow into each Christian
soul of the uniting 'Spirit of life in Christ Jesus' which makes the
many who may be gathered into separate folds one flock clustered
around the one Shepherd. And if that unity be thus a fundamental fact
in the Christian life and entirely apart from external organisation,