pon the right one?

Questions like these, put to be considered, not to be answered, raise in
the mind the misgiving that we have been seeking in diplomatic
negotiations between high contracting parties that which diplomacy can
do only a little toward accomplishing. The great aim is to be sought in
humbler ways. It is more hopeful to begin at the lower end. Not in great
towns and centers of ecclesiastical influence, but in villages and
country districts, the deadly effects of comminuted fracture in the
church are most deeply felt. It is directly to the people of such
communities, not through the medium of persons or committees that
represent national sectarian interests, that the new commandment is to
be preached, which yet is no new commandment, but the old commandment
which they have had from the beginning. It cannot always be that sincere
Christian believers, living together in a neighborhood in which the
ruinous effects of division are plain to every eye, shall continue to
misapprehend or disregard some of the tenderest and most unmistakable
counsels of their Lord and his apostles, or imagine the authority of
them to be canceled by the authority of any sect or party of Christians.
The double fallacy, first, that it is a Christian's prime duty to look
out for his own soul, and, secondly, that the soul's best health is to
be secured by sequestering it from contact with dissentient opinions,
and indulging its tastes and preferences wherein they differ from those
of its neighbor, must sometime be found out and exposed. The discovery
will be made that there is nothing in the most cherished sermons and
sacraments and prayers that is comparable in value, as a means of grace,
with the giving up of all these for God's reign and righteousness--that
he who will save his soul shall lose it, and he who will lose his soul
for Christ and his gospel shall save it to life eternal. These centuries
of church history, beginning with convulsive disruptions of the church
in Europe, with persecutions and religious wars, present before us the
importation into the New World of the religious divisions and
subdivisions of the Old, and the further division of these beyond any
precedent in history. It begins to look as if in this "strange work" God
had been grinding up material for a nobler manifestation of the unity of
his people. The sky of the declining century is red with promise.
Hitherto, not the decay of religious earnestness only, but the