ep was his perplexity as
he found into how many countless sects the "one body" had been divided.
Very contrary to the Bible it seemed, but very helplessly he stood
before the fact that seemed as hopeless of remedy as of denial. What
ought he, one unit among the whole, to do about it? Kindly people
sought to draw him into their various fellowships, and he peered into
their folds and sought to find the place where his Lord was most
honored and His presence most manifest. He found old churches, great
and cold, whose service moved with slumbrous calm, and his ardent soul
was chilled. He found others where activity bristled and cheerfulness
prevailed, but where the world held court as obvious as in the market
square; and from these he turned away with a still sharper grief. He
found other congregations built in strife and schism, but with some
fragrance still of the name of Jesus Christ, and rejoiced that He was
preached.

"'They feared the Lord and served their own gods,'" he said to himself,
as almost everywhere he saw the strange mingling of worship of the true
God with the too patent service of the gods of pleasure and of wealth.

He found little companies, gathered in protest from shameless
worldliness or infidel denial of the Lord, and with them he had
sympathy, but still looked hungrily for a fuller expression of the
truth than they offered. He found himself in companies where correct,
punctilious statements of the truth abounded, and where the most
careful zeal sought to restore an apostolic order of worship. But he
found that the statements grew dry and juiceless in their formal
exactness, and that prescribed form could not insure the animating
Spirit without which it was as useless as the phylacteries of the
Pharisees. He concluded that truth was deeper and fresher than any
definitions of it, as the fountain excels the cistern; and that life
was sovereign over form, though in form it embody itself.

He found perfection nowhere. After a disappointing meeting, the climax
of a series of experiences in which arguments from various schools of
doctrine had jostled against each other, and the varying phases of
practice, emotional, anti-emotional, informal and ritualistic, with the
intervening shades of difference, had presented themselves, he stood in
the veranda at home with Winifred and described to her the procession
of rival claims which a divided church presents to a Christian man's
adherence, and ended w