idely diffused. The
amount of ambition, insolence, and impatience in the Church has, in
fact, been so vast that it remains no longer a matter {162} for
astonishment that it should have made the havoc that it has made in the
divine household, and should have thwarted, as it has thwarted, the
divine intention. But the recognition of this fact lays on us the duty
of meditating continually on the divine intention, and by all that lies
in our power, by prayer and by every other means, to restore the
recognition of the divine principle of unity whether in the narrower or
the wider circle of church life.

It is not too much to say that the now popular principle of the free
voluntary association of Christians in societies organized to suit
varying phases of taste, is destructive of the moral discipline
intended for us. It was the obligation to belong to one body which was
intended as the restraint on the prejudices and eccentricities of race,
classes and individuals. If Greeks, Italians, and Englishmen are to be
content to belong to different churches; if among ourselves we are to
have one church for the well-to-do, and another for 'labour'; if any
individual who is offended in one church is to be free to go off to
another where he or she likes the minister better--where does the need
come in for the forbearance and long-suffering and humility on which
St. Paul {163} insists as the necessary virtues of the one body? We,
Christians but not in one brotherhood, may not be able to agree at
present among ourselves as to the proper basis of ecclesiastical unity,
but we ought to be able to agree that, somehow or other, Christians are
intended by Christ and by the apostle to be one body, and that the
wilful violation of outward unity is truly a refusal of the yoke of
Christ.

And a great step would have been taken towards rendering the recovery
of ecclesiastical unity more easy if those who recognize the obligation
of the principle could be brought to perceive that true Catholicism
really requires a large measure of toleration and a deliberate
reasonableness. At present it is not too much to say that the idea of
the obligation of ecclesiastical unity is widely associated with an
emphasis on ecclesiastical and dogmatic authority such as is utterly
alien to the mind of the apostle of Catholicism.

v.

In what has been said above we have been attending chiefly to the
restraints which St. Paul's idea of church unity appears to