lly conscious of its common aim.

But the very intimacy of the Pauline picture of charity makes it hard
to apply this account of the {296} loyalty that should reign within a
religious family to the problems of a world where faith does not
understand faith, where the contrasts of opinion seem to the men in
question to exclude community of the spirit, where the fighting blood
even of saintly souls is stirred by persecutions or heated by a hatred
of seemingly false creeds. And Paul himself could not speak in the
language of charity, either when he referred to those whom he called
"false brethren" or characterised the Hellenic-Roman spiritual world
to whose thought and spirit he owed so much. As the Corinthians,
warring over the spiritual gifts, were a miniature representation of
the motives that have led to religious wars, so St. Paul's own failure
to speak with charity as soon as certain matters of controversy arose
in his mind, shows in miniature the difficulty that the visible
church, in all its forms, has had to unite loyal strenuousness of
devotion to the truth that one sees with tolerance for the faiths
whose meaning one cannot understand.

And yet, what Paul said about charity must be universalised if it is
true. When we universalise the Pauline Charity, it becomes once more
the loyalty that, as a fact, is now justified in seeking her loyal
own; but that still, like charity, rejoices in the truth. Such loyalty
loves loyalty even when race or creed distinctions make it hard or
impossible for us to feel fond of the persons and practices and
opinions whereby our more distant brethren {297} embody their
spiritual gifts. Such loyalty is tolerant. Tolerance is what charity
becomes when we have to deal with those whose special cause we just
now cannot understand. Loyalty is tolerant, not as if truth were
indifferent, or as if there were no contrast between worldliness and
spirituality, but is tolerant precisely in so far as the best service
of loyalty and of religion and of the unity of the spirit consists in
helping our brethren not to our own, but to _their_ own. _Such loyalty
implies genuine faith in the abiding and supreme unity of the spirit._

Only by thus universalising the doctrine which Paul preached to the
Corinthians can we be prepared to use to the full this crowning source
of insight--the doctrine, the example, the life, the inspiration,
which is embodied in the countless forms and expressions of the
invisi