It is not too much to say that the now popular principle of the free voluntary association of Christians in societies organized to suit varying phases of taste, is destructive of the moral discipline intended for us. It was the obligation to belong to one body which was intended as the restraint on the prejudices and eccentricities of race, classes and individuals. If Greeks, Italians, and Englishmen are to be content to belong to different churches; if among ourselves we are to have one church for the well-to-do, and another for 'labour'; if any individual who is offended in one church is to be free to go off to another where he or she likes the minister better--where does the need come in for the forbearance and long-suffering and humility on which St. Paul {163} insists as the necessary virtues of the one body? We, Christians but not in one brotherhood, may not be able to agree at present among ourselves as to the proper basis of ecclesiastical unity, but we ought to be able to agree that, somehow or other, Christians are intended by Christ and by the apostle to be one body, and that the wilful violation of outward unity is truly a refusal of the yoke of Christ. And a great step would have been taken towards rendering the recovery of ecclesiastical unity more easy if those who recognize the obligation of the principle could be brought to perceive that true Catholicism really requires a large measure of toleration and a deliberate reasonableness. At present it is not too much to say that the idea of the obligation of ecclesiastical unity is widely associated with an emphasis on ecclesiastical and dogmatic authority such as is utterly alien to the mind of the apostle of Catholicism. v.