of Rome or of Caesar's household. The man who knelt to receive
his communion might be a great nobleman, the priest who communicated him
might be a slave: that did not matter; the significant thing was that
they were both one in Jesus Christ.

That did not last. I suppose that it could not be expected to last in an
unconverted or half converted world. It could only last on condition of
the fairly complete isolation of the Christian group from the rest of
society, pending the conversion of society as a whole. But it proved
impossible to secure the isolation. The only real isolation was in
monastic groups which naturally could contain only such men and women as
God called to a special sort of life: the whole of society could not be
so organised. As the Church grew and took in the various social
constituents included in the Empire, it took them in differentiated as
they were. There seems to have been no real effort to break down race
distinctions or class distinctions. There were no doubt protests, but
the protests were as ineffective then as now. "You cannot change human
nature," men say; but that in fact is precisely what Christianity
claims to do. Unless it can change human nature it is a failure.

The ideal of Christianity is not the abolition of inequality (only a
certain sort of social theorists are insane enough to expect that). All
men are born unequal in a variety of ways, physical, intellectual,
moral; and under any form of society that so far has been invented they
are born in social classes which remain very hard realities in spite of
our theories. What Christianity aims at accomplishing is to transcend
these inequalities, natural and artificial, by raising men to a state of
spiritual equality, a state which ensures true and full enjoyment of all
the privileges of the child of God. In this state there is open to all
the gift of sanctifying grace which is the possession of God now, and in
the future will unfold into the capacity of the complete participation
of the life of heaven. This belongs to, is within the grasp of, any
child, any ignorant peasant, any toiler, as much as it is within the
grasp of bishop or priest or Religious. And this much--and how much it
is!--the Church has succeeded in accomplishing. It may be slow in
offering the riches of the Gospel to the unconverted world, but where it
has presented the Gospel, it presents it to all men as a Gospel of
salvation and sanctification. When tempted to di