llowing of Work_, p. 57. Longmans, 1891.

{47}

XVII

CHRISTIAN UNITY

_Ephesians_ iv. 13.

We hear much in these days of Christian unity, and many programmes and
platforms and propositions are presented to us, as though religious
unity were a thing to be constructed and put together like a building,
which should be big enough to hold us all. But in this splendid
chapter religious unity is regarded by the apostle, not as a thing
which is to be made, but as a thing which is to grow. "There is," he
says "one body and one spirit; there is a unity of the faith. But we
do not make this unity; we grow up into it as we attain unto a
full-grown man; we attain unto it as a boy becomes a man, not by
discussing his growth, or by worrying because he is not a man, or by
bragging that he is bigger than other boys, but simply by growing up.
Thus, as people grow up into Christ, they grow up into unity. The
unity comes not of the assent of man to certain propositions, but of
the ascent of man to {48} the stature of Christ. And so what hinders
unity is that we have not got our spiritual growth. It takes a
full-grown mind to reach it. It takes a full-grown heart to feel it.
The unity is always waiting at the top. Religious progress is like the
ascent of a hill from various sides. Below there is division,
obstructive underbrush, perplexity; but as the top is neared there is
ever a closer approach of man to man; and at the summit there is the
same view for all, and that view is a view all round. The climbers
attain to the measure of the stature of Christ, and they attain at the
same time to the unity of the faith.

{49}

XVIII

THE PATIENCE OF FAITH

_Mark_ iv. 28.

Jesus here falls back, as he so often does, on the gradualness of
nature. Life, he says, is not abrupt and revolutionary in its method;
it is gradual and evolutionary: the seed is sown and slowly comes to
fruitage; the leaven silently penetrates the lump; the grain grows,
first the blade, then the ear, finally the full corn. The best things
in the world do not come with a rush. Some things have to be waited
for. Faith is patient. And this he says, not only against the nervous
hurry of life, which is, as we all know, cursing the American world
to-day, but also against the spiritual impatience which is to be
observed in every age. The most marked illustration of it to-day is in
our dealings with the social movements of the time. It is t