When we look back over the long centuries that separate us from the early Apostolic Church, there are few things which make us sadder than this spirit of distrust and hostility, showing itself between men who alike believe themselves to be Christians. [p.147] It is no new thing; what is new to-day as a wide spread spirit is the desire to transcend our differences, not by despising or ignoring the things which separate us, nor yet by the victory of one church or sect over another, or the absorption of the lesser by the greater community, but by the better understanding of each other and of ourselves, the closer co-operation where co-operation is possible, and, it may be, the gradual realisation of a unity deeper than all that keeps us apart. We remember how the mocking scorn of Celsus made sport of the divisions between Catholic and heretic Christians of his day, while both alike were a persecuted minority struggling against the edicts of pagan Rome. Montanists and orthodox suffered sometimes side by side, and yet, while awaiting death in the same prisons, they would hold no communion with each other. This tragic mutual intolerance between Arian and Athanasian, Iconodule and Iconoclast, goes on down the ages; was it not, in part at least, one wonders, due to the fact that each party considered that they alone had the monopoly of truth; that their own doctrine contained the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Free trade in thought, if it be right to use the metaphor of commerce for the life-giving intercourse of mind with mind, is late in coming in the world's history, but it has surely come to stay. As we look back over the great divisions of the past, we feel now that there was some right at least on both sides: in some [p.148] cases we find it hard to understand how men could have fought so bitterly over what seems now so small. The shape of the tonsure of the clergy, the date of the celebration of Easter, and such grounds of difference, caused almost as much bitterness in their day as did profound dissensions on the nature of the Godhead or the meaning of the Incarnation. Even when no theological difference separated men, within the Church itself and within a single religious order, there has been the bitterest disagreement and separation of spirit over things we now hold trifling; such a matter, for instance, as the shape of the hood to be worn by Observant Franciscans, at the time of the rise of the Capuchin Friars.