igious history is a tale of suffering--of mutual
misunderstanding amongst brethren who have from moment to moment been
able to remember God only by narrowly misreading the hearts of their
brethren. The diversity of spiritual gifts has developed, in religious
history, an endless war of factions. The invisible church has
frequently come to consciousness in the form of sects that say: "Ours
alone is the true spiritual gift. Through our triumph alone is the
world to be saved. Man will reach salvation only when our own
Jerusalem is the universally recognised holy city."

Now it is useless to reduce the many to the one merely by wiping out
the many. It is useless to make some new sect whose creed shall be
that there are to be no sects. _The unity of the visible church, under
any one creed, or with any one settled system of religious practices,
is an unattainable and undesirable ideal._ The varieties of religious
experience in James's sense of that term are endless. The diversity of
gifts is as great as is the diversity of strong and loyal
personalities. What St. Paul saw, in the miniature case presented to
him by the {295} Corinthian church, was that all the real gifts, and
all the consequently inevitable differences of approach to the
religious problems, and all the differences of individual religious
insight were necessary to a wealthy religious life, and might serve
the unity of the spirit, if only they were conceived and used subject
to the spiritual gift which he defined as Charity.

Now the Pauline Charity is simply _that_ form of loyalty which should
characterise a company of brethren who already have recognised their
brotherhood, who consciously know that their cause is one and that the
spirit which they serve is one. For such brethren, loyalty naturally
takes the form of a self-surrender that need not seek its own, or
assert itself vehemently, because the visible unity of the community
in question is already acknowledged by all the faithful present, so
that each intends to edify, not himself alone, but his brethren, and
also intends not to convert his brother to a new faith, but to
establish him in a faith already recognised by the community. Yet
since the Corinthians, warring over their diversity of gifts, had come
to lose sight of the common spirit, Paul simply recalls them to their
flag, by his poem of charity, which is also a technically true
statement of how the principle of loyalty applies to a brotherhood
fu