deepest clefts that separate modern society, and makes all one in
Jesus Christ. It is all very well for us to glorify the ancient love
of the early Christians, but there is a vast deal of false
sentimentality about our eulogistic talk of it. It were better to
praise it less and imitate it more. Translate it into present life,
and you will find that to-day it requires what it nineteen hundred
years ago was recognised as manifesting, the presence of something
more than human motive, and something more than man discovers of
truth. The cement must be divine that binds men thus together.

Again, these two households suggest for us the tranquillising power
of Christian resignation.

They were mostly slaves, and they continued to be slaves when they
were Christians. Paul recognised their continuance in the servile
position, and did not say a word to them to induce them to break
their bonds. The Epistle to the Corinthians treats the whole subject
of slavery in a very remarkable fashion. It says to the slave: 'If
you were a slave when you became a Christian, stop where you are. If
you have an opportunity of being free, avail yourself of it; if you
have not, never mind.' And then it adds this great principle: 'He
that is called in the Lord, being a slave, is Christ's freeman.
Likewise he that is called, being free, is Christ's slave.' The
Apostle applies the very same principle, in the adjoining verses, to
the distinction between circumcision and uncircumcision. From all
which there comes just the same lesson that is taught us by these two
households of slaves left intact by Christianity--viz. that where a
man is conscious of a direct, individual relation to Jesus Christ,
that makes all outward circumstances infinitely insignificant. Let us
get up to the height, and they all become very small. Of course, the
principles of Christianity killed slavery, but it took eighteen
hundred years to do it. Of course, there is no blinking the fact that
slavery was an essentially immoral and unchristian institution. But
it is one thing to lay down principles and leave them to be worked in
and then to be worked out, and it is another thing to go blindly
charging at existing institutions and throwing them down by violence,
before men have grown up to feel that they are wicked. And so the New
Testament takes the wise course, and leaves the foolish one to
foolish people. It makes the tree good, and then its fruit will be
good.

But the main p