Paul Sabatier has finely said that one of the great claims which distinguishes still the ancient Catholic Church is the unlimited opportunity for self-sacrifice which she holds forth to her children. We cannot get the utmost except for the highest. Our house of prayer and of work, where self-denial might be found to the full united with the joy of service, would give this opportunity of self-surrender, of self-discipline untainted by false asceticism, of comradeship in sacrifice and in the purest joys and highest aspirations of the heart, which in the depths of our soul we need and long for. May it not even yet be built, this House of Peace and Prayer? CHAPTER X.: THE PATH TO UNITY. A GREAT patristic scholar who, though a lover of theology, is also a lover of his fellow-men, has related how, journeying across the lonely desert of Arabia the Rocky towards the holy monastery of Sinai, he came upon a band of peasant pilgrims; he did not know their language nor they his, but each made the sign of the Cross as they drew near one another, and as they did so they seemed at once to be friends. He was greeted with welcoming smiles, and the way through the wilderness was lightened by the sense of Christian fellowship. It cheered him to feel how that ancient sacred symbol had surmounted the barriers of race and speech, making these strangers feel that they were comrades and fellow pilgrims travelling to a common goal. And yet he could not but recall with a sense of sorrowful irony the thought that, had he made the sign of the Cross not in the Greek, but in the Latin way, he would have been met with sullen indifference and distrust, if not with anger. These simple Russian peasants were the spiritual descendants of the [p.146] brave men who centuries ago went to death at the stake rather than place their fingers and thumb in the new-fangled way, which, to their mind, symbolised some error in the conception of the doctrine of the Trinity, a departure from the one orthodox fashion by which the Church should be guided in making the holy sign. It is difficult for us to realise that so small a change should make so great a difference to the welcome given to a stranger; and, yet, perhaps some of the differences which separate Western Christians to-day may be almost as foolish in the sight of the angels. An English parson once sadly told how, when travelling in France in his cassock, he had been delighted by a number of ecclesiastics coming to call upon their foreign confrere, and how, to his dismay, they all incontinently fled, as from contagion of plague, when they realised that he was only an Anglican; he doubtless felt acutely the blindness of the worthy Romans who failed to recognise the apostolic nature of his orders. As acutely, perhaps, some Nonconformist minister at home may have regretted a similar attitude on the part of the good parson to the unhallowed ministrations of the dissenter.