This is the common case of the young whether boy or girl to-day, and the practical question is, Can they endure the isolation? It is easy to say: Let them make Christian friends; but that is not always practical, especially in the present state of the Church when there is no cohesion among its members, no true sense of constituting a Brotherhood, of being members of the same Body. We have to admit that the attempt to hold a high standard usually ends in failure, at least the practical failure of a weak compromise. But there are characters that are strong enough to face the isolation and to readjust life on the basis of the new principles and to mould it in accord with the new ideals. The period of this readjustment is one of severe testing of one's grasp on principles and one's strength of purpose. But the battle once fought out we attain a new kind of freedom and expansion of life. We look back with some amusement at the old life and the things that fascinated us in the days of our spiritual unconsciousness much as we look back at the games that amused us in our childish hours. The desert of Egypt that we entered with trepidation and fearful hearts turns out not to be so dreadful as we imagined, and indeed the flowers spring up under our feet as we resolutely tread the desert way. These trials must be the daily experience of those who attempt to put their religion into practice, and these perplexities must assail them so long as the Christian community continues to show its present social incompetence; so long, that is, as we attempt to make the basis of our social action something other than the principles of the spiritual life. A Christian society, one would naturally think, would spring out of the possession of Christian ideals; and doubtless it would if these ideals were really dominant in life, and not a sort of ornament applied to it. Any social circle contains men and women of various degrees of intellectual development and of varying degrees of experience of life; what holds them together is the pursuit of common objects, the objects that we sum up as amusement. Now the Christians in a community certainly have a common object, the cultivation of the spiritual life through the supernatural means offered by the Church of God. One would think that this object would have a more constraining power than the attractions of motoring or golf; but in fact we know that this is not so save in individual cases. There is not, that is to say, anywhere visible a Christian community which is wrought into a unity by the solidifying forces of its professed ideals. Those very people whose paths converge week by week until they meet at this altar, as they leave the altar, follow diverging paths and live in isolation for the rest of their time.