We have got into a habit of talking about the 'brotherhood of man' as if it was an easy and obvious truth. All our experience of our English relations with races of a different colour to our own, nay, all our experience of class divisions at home, might have served to check this easy-going sort of language. If we will consent to pause and reflect on the actual difficulty of behaving or feeling as brethren should behave and feel towards men of other races and of other educations and habits than our own, we may be more inclined to believe that it is only through some fundamental eradication of selfishness and inherent narrowness that it can be made possible; only when we begin to live from some centre greater than ourselves. And that is the moral meaning of the constant doctrine of the New Testament, that only through being reconciled to God can we be reconciled to one {128} another--only in Christ that men can permanently and satisfactorily learn to love one another, when racial and educational and personal antipathies make for separation and not for unity. Now perhaps we are in a position to read with greater intelligence what St. Paul wrote about 'the dispensation of the divine mystery,' i.e. 'the stewardship of the divine secret,' of the brotherhood of all men in Christ or the catholicity of the Church, which had been committed to him by the 'revelation' which followed his conversion to Christ[8]. The doctrine of the brotherhood of men is in fact as much a peculiarly Christian doctrine as that of divine sonship, and both alike are, in the New Testament language, represented as realized only within the community of the baptized. The facts of New Testament language compel us to say and to recognize this[9]. But {129} we are bound to recognize also that they are truths which, when they are heard, are welcomed by the natural conscience everywhere. For as all men are 'God's offspring[10],' by the very fact of their creation as men, so they are fitted to receive the privilege of sonship: and as they are 'made of one[11],' so they are fitted to realize the privilege of brotherhood. It is but to say the same thing in other words, if we insist that Christians are the elect body, to realize and express among men an idea of human nature which is the only true idea, and which, overlaid and forgotten as it may have been, has never ceased to stir in man's heart and conscience everywhere. The elect are elected for no other purpose than to make manifest what all men are capable of becoming, and, if they will obey God, are destined to become.