riving. The reproach of that sinful blunder is one that none of our
greater Churches--Roman, Anglican, Presbyterian, or Puritan--can cast in
another's teeth. Each of us committed it in our day of triumph. "What
fruit had we then in those things whereof we are now ashamed?" The
memory--one-sided, and carefully cultivated--of what each suffered in
its turn of adversity has hitherto been a potent agency for keeping us
apart. To-day those memories are fading. I was much struck by a remark I
heard last spring from the Bishop of Southwark, that one reason why we
are more ready nowadays to contemplate reunion is just that we belong to
a generation to whom those miserable doings are far-off things outside
alike our experience and our expectation.

In other ways also we discern leadings of Our Saviour to the same end.

Through Whitefield and the Wesleys, and the Evangelical Revival, He
re-awakened the peoples of England and America to a keen sense of the
need for personal religion. Where these powerful agencies had the
defects of their qualities, in their failure to appreciate aright His
gracious ordinances of Church and Ministry and Sacrament, He rectified
the balance by giving us in due course the Oxford Movement, whose force
is not "spent," but diffused through all our "denominations." Let us be
just to the Oxford Movement: without it, humanly speaking, we should not
have been here to-day. If it had its own narrownesses, it revived the
very studies which, while they have revealed the inadequacy of certain
of its postulates, have also brought clear into the view of all of us
the Divine goal which now gleams glorious in front of us--the goal of
the great Apostle--"the building up of the Body of Christ: till we all
attain unto the unity of the Faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of
God, unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the
fulness of Christ."

A Scotsman may be excused for referring to the debt which the leaders of
the Oxford Movement--Dr Pusey in particular was always ready to admit
it--owed to Sir Walter Scott, particularly in re-awakening a more
sympathetic interest in the Mediaeval Church. If Sir Walter's countrymen
were slower to follow him in this matter, they are doing so now in
unexpected quarters. We are full to-day of the American alliance: may I
remind you that Sir Walter Scott was the first British man of letters to
hail the early promise of American literature by his cordial welcome to