s no family yet, for the lack of peace. Wherever peace is
growing, there of course is the live peace, counteracting disruption and
disintegration, and helping the development of the true essential
family. The one question, therefore, as to any family is, whether peace
or strife be on the increase in it; for peace alone makes it possible
for the binding grass-roots of life--love, namely, and justice--to
spread throughout what were else but a wind-blown heap of still drifting
sand. The peace-makers quiet the winds of the world ever ready to be up
and blowing; they tend and cherish the interlacing roots of the
ministering grass; they spin and twist many uniting cords, and they
weave many supporting bands; they are the servants, for the truth's
sake, of the individual, of the family, of the world, of the great
universal family of heaven and earth. They are the true children of that
family, the allies and ministers of every clasping and consolidating
force in it; fellow-workers they are with God in the creation of the
family; they help him to get it to his mind, to perfect his father-idea.
Ever radiating peace, they welcome love, but do not seek it; they
provoke no jealousy. They are the children of God, for like him they
would be one with his creatures. His eldest son, his very likeness, was
the first of the family-peace-makers. Preaching peace to them that were
afar off and them that were nigh, he stood undefended in the turbulent
crowd of his fellows, and it was only over his dead body that his
brothers began to come together in the peace that will not be broken. He
rose again from the dead; his peace-making brothers, like himself, are
dying unto sin; and not yet have the evil children made their father
hate, or their elder brother flinch.

On the other hand, those whose influence is to divide and separate,
causing the hearts of men to lean away from each other, make themselves
the children of the evil one: born of God and not of the devil, they
turn from God, and adopt the devil their father. They set their God-born
life against God, against the whole creative, redemptive purpose of his
unifying will, ever obstructing the one prayer of the first-born--that
the children may be one with him in the Father. Against the heart-end of
creation, against that for which the Son yielded himself utterly, the
sowers of strife, the fomenters of discord, contend ceaseless. They do
their part with all the other powers of evil to make the