with clearer heads. Orchids grow in rich men's
greenhouses, fastened to a bit of stick, and they spread a fairer
blossom that lasts longer than many a plant that is rooted in a more
fertile soil. Let us be thankful for the blessed inconsistencies which
knit some to the Christ who is more to them than they know.

There is also here laid down for us the great principle, as against all
narrowness and all externalism, and all so-called ecclesiasticism, that
to be joined to Jesus Christ is the one condition which brings a man
into the blessed unity of the Church. Now it seems to me that, however
they may be to be lamented on other grounds, and they are to be lamented
on many, the existence of diverse Churches does not necessarily
interfere with this deep-seated and central unity. There is a great deal
said to-day about the reunion of Christendom, by which is meant the
destruction of existing communions and the formation of a wider one. I
do not believe, and I suppose you do not, that our existing
ecclesiastical organisations are the final form of the Church of the
living God. But let us remember that the two things are by no means
contradictory, the belief in, and the realising of, the essential unity
of the Church, and the existence of diverse communions. You will see on
the side of many a Cumberland hill a great stretch of limestone with
clefts a foot or two deep in it--there are flowers in the clefts, by the
bye--but go down a couple of yards and the divisions have all
disappeared, and the base-rock stretches continuously. The separations
are superficial; the unity is fundamental. Do not let us play into the
hands of people whose only notion of unity is that of a mechanical
juxtaposition held together by some formula or orders; but let us
recognise that the true unity is in the presence of Jesus Christ in the
midst, and in the common grasp of Him by us all.

There is a well-known hymn which was originally intended as a High
Church manifesto, which thrusts at us Nonconformists when it sings:

'_We_ are not divided,
All one body _we_.'

And oddly enough, but significantly too, it has found its way into all
our Nonconformist hymn-books, and we, 'the sects,' are singing it, with
perhaps a nobler conception of what the oneness of the body, and the
unity of the Church is, than the writer of the words had. 'We are not
divided,' though we be organised apart. 'All one body we,' for we all
partake of that one bread, a