an any of which we have any
experience, it, and it alone, threw a bridge across the abysses and
bound men together. Think of what a revolution it must have been,
when a master and his slave could sit down together at the table of
the Lord and look each other in the face and say 'Brother' and for
the moment forget the difference of bond and free. Think of what a
revolution it must have been when Jew and Gentile could sit down
together at the table of the Lord, and forget circumcision and
uncircumcision, and feel that they were all one in Jesus Christ. And
as for the third of the great clefts--that, alas! which made so much
of the tragedy and the wickedness of ancient life--viz. the
separation between the sexes--think of what a revolution it was when
men and women, in all purity of the new bond of Christian affection,
could sit down together at the same table, and feel that they were
brethren and sisters in Jesus Christ.

The uniting power of the common faith and the common love to the one
Lord marked Christianity as altogether supernatural and new, unique
in the world's experience, and obviously requiring something more
than a human force to produce it. Will anybody say that the
Christianity of this day has preserved and exhibits that primitive
demonstration of its superhuman source? Is there anything obviously
beyond the power of earthly motives in the unselfish, expansive love
of modern Christians? Alas! alas! to ask the question is to answer
it, and everybody knows the answer, and nobody sorrows over it. Is
any duty more pressingly laid upon Christian churches of this
generation than that, forgetting their doctrinal janglings for a
while, and putting away their sectarianisms and narrowness, they
should show the world that their faith has still the power to do what
it did in the old times, bridge over the gulf that separates class
from class, and bring all men together in the unity of the faith and
of the love of Jesus Christ? Depend upon it, unless the modern
organisations of Christianity which call themselves 'churches' show
themselves, in the next twenty years, a great deal more alive to the
necessity, and a great deal more able to cope with the problem, of
uniting the classes of our modern complex civilisation, the term of
life of these churches is comparatively brief. And the form of
Christianity which another century will see will be one which
reproduces the old miracle of the early days, and reaches across the