Deeper even than the sacrament of joy is that of sorrow, and we may learn something of it from John Woolman, the Quaker apostle of Christ's sufferings. Where men suffered he suffered too in spirit with them. When he came on his last journey to England he could not travel in the comfortable cabin because of the needless toil of the workmen that had gone to adorn it, but must share with the poor sailors the foul air and discomfort of the steerage. And when on the stormy passage across the Atlantic he lay there sick and in pain, his heart went up in thankfulness that he was permitted to share the experience which so many of his fellow-men had to go through, and be united thus to suffering humanity. "I was now desirous," he tells us, "to embrace every opportunity of being inwardly acquainted with the hardships and difficulties of my fellow-creatures, and to labour in His love for the spreading of pure righteousness on the earth." Then we shall remember, too, that beautiful passage near the close of his journal, where he recalls the vision that came to him in time of sickness of that mass of dull, gloomy colour, made up of [p.32] human beings in as great misery as they could be and live, and how he was told that he was mixed with them and henceforth might not consider himself a separate being. The angel's song, "John Woolman is dead," sounded to him more pure and lovely than any he had ever heard before, for in truth his old will was dead, and in him the spirit of Christ was alive. Is it not here that the Church will find the way to reconcile the world of toilers and sufferers estranged from her to-day? — in that unity between her members which goes deeper even than membership, in a love to Christ which shows itself, as He calls for it, towards all who have need of Him, which identifies the Christian with his brothers, the doers and bearers of wrong? As we look out upon a Christendom divided by sects and creeds into a score of different bodies, we may be saddened by the lament which many a devout lip has uttered over the schisms which rend the mystic robe of the Master. But it was only His outer garments which the soldiers rent asunder: the seamless robe is unsevered still. External separation does not touch the spirit of love and true communion which beneath countless outer differences unites together the lives of all who follow Him in deed and in truth. And as we each draw nearer to Him, and His life flows into our lives, we must draw nearer to each other and to all our fellow-men. CHAPTER III. THE PROPHET IN THE CHURCH.