rbearance, courage and freedom, in all these they are at one.
The instinctive recognition of an attack on the ideal is alive and
vigilant in all three. The sympathy that binds them is ardent, deep and
enduring. Observe them come together. Note the warm hand grasp, the
drawn face of one, a hard-worker; of another, the eye anxious for a
brother hard pressed; of the third, the eye glistening for the ideal
triumphant; of all the intimate confidence, the mutual encouragement and
self-sacrifice, never a note of despair, but always the exultation of
the Great Fight, and the promise of a great victory. This is a finer
company than a mere casual alliance; yet it makes the uninspired pause,
wondering and questioning. These men are earnest men of different
creeds; still they are as intimately bound to one another as if they
knelt at the one altar. In the narrow view the creeds should be at one
another's throats; here they are marching shoulder to shoulder. How is
this? And the one whose creed is the most exacting could, perhaps, give
the best reply. He would reply that within the sphere in which they work
together the true thing that unites them can be done only the one right
way; that instinctively seizing this right way they come together; that
this is the line of advance to wider and deeper things that are his
inspiration and his life; that if a comrade is roused to action by the
nearer task, and labours bravely and rightly for it, he is on the road
to widening vistas in his dream that now he may not see. That is what he
would say whose vision of life is the widest. All objectors he may not
satisfy. That what is life to him may leave his comrade cold is a
difficulty; but against the difficulty stand the depth and reality of
their comradeship, proven by mutual sacrifice, endurance, and faith, and
he never doubts that their bond union will sometime prove to have a
wise and beautiful meaning in the Annals of God.

III

But the men of different creeds who stand firmly and loyally together
are a minority. We are faced with the great difficulty of uniting as a
whole North and South; and we are faced with the grim fact that many
whom we desire to unite are angrily repudiating a like desire, that many
are sarcastically noting this, that many are coldly refusing to believe;
while through it all the most bitter are emphasising enmity and
glorifying it. All these unbelievers keep insisting North and South are
natural enemies and must