deal
about 'the rivalries of jarring sects.' I believe that is such an
enormous exaggeration that it is an untruth. There is rivalry, but you
know as well as I do that, shabby and shameful as it is, it is a kind of
commercial rivalry between contiguous places of worship, be they chapels
or churches, be they buildings belonging to the same or to different
denominations. I, for my part, after a pretty long experience now, have
seen so little of that said bitter rivalry between the Nonconformist
sects, _as sects_, that to me it is all but non-existent. And I believe
the most of us ministers, going about amongst the various communities,
could say the same thing. But in the face of a cultivated England
laughing at your creed of Jesus, the Christ, the Lord; and in the face
of a strange and puerile recrudescence of sacerdotalism and
sacramentarianism, which shoves a priest and a rite into the place where
Christ should stand, it becomes us Nonconformists who believe that we
know a more excellent way to stand shoulder to shoulder, and show that
the unities that bind us are far more than the diversities that
separate.

It becomes us, too, to further conjoint action in social matters. Thank
God we are beginning to stir in that direction in Manchester--not before
it was time. And I beseech you professing Christians, of all Evangelical
communions, to help in bringing Christian motives and principles to bear
on the discussion of social and municipal and economical conditions in
this great city of ours.

And there surely ought to be more concert than we have had in aggressive
work; that we should a little more take account of each other's action
in regulating our own; and that we should not have the scandal, which we
too often have allowed to exist, of overlapping one another in such a
fashion as that rivalry and mere trade competition is almost inevitable.

These are very humble, prosaic suggestions, but they would go a long
way, if they were observed, to sweeten our own tempers, and to make
visible to the world our true unity. Let us all seek to widen our
sympathies as widely as Christ's grace flows; to count none strangers
whom He counts friends; to discipline ourselves to feel that we are
girded with that electric chain which makes all who grasp it one, and
sends the same keen thrill through them all. If a circle were a mile in
diameter, and its circumference were dotted with many separate points,
how much nearer each of these