One of the clearest illustrations of the principle is before our eyes in our experience to-day. When the spirit of national patriotism makes its appeal, no one has to make any effort to understand its claim; our nation is a definite and concrete society in which we easily realise our membership to the full. We know that there is no escaping from it, and that, when it appeals for our service or our lives, we must either respond or refuse. But the Christian Church, as we know it, is powerless to bring home its appeal in the same way. Largely because of its divisions and endless controversy about the points, secondary though important, which separate the various sections, it has become curiously impotent in the face of any great occasion such as the present, and curiously unsuccessful in persuading either its own members or the world outside of the nature of its mission. We are not conscious, for example, that we are permanently either responding to, or else refusing, the appeal to "preach the Gospel to every creature." That appeal does not hit us personally as does the appeal, "every fit man wanted." Our membership in the Church does not in fact make us feel a personal obligation to assist the cause of the Church. We are content to "belong to it" without admitting that it has any power to dispose of its "belongings"; we think that we "support" it by "going to church" and contributing to "church expenses." But we feel no link with our fellow-Christians in Germany at all comparable to that which binds us to an agnostic but patriotic Englishman, or at all capable of bridging spontaneously the gulf fixed by national antagonism. By a deliberate effort we can realise that we and they are equally precious in the sight of God, and that they are our fellow-members in Christ. But there is no realised bond of corporate unity that binds us to each other, and we rely upon the very feeble resources of our personal good-will and personal faith for any sense of unity with them that we may attain. The Church is less powerful than the nation as an influence in our lives, partly at least because it is in fact less actual. The Church universal, whether as an organisation or as spirit of life, is an ideal, not a reality.