We are at present divided into classes with warring interests waiting for peace to begin the strife again. The body-politic is fissiparous and there is nothing to bind it together in the unity and consistency of steel. Here is the element through which the disintegrated elements can be united into a weapon that can win victories. At the feet of God there comes the knowledge that all we are brethren, and that the one law is love. It is love that unites. It is love that bridges chasms and throws down dividing walls. Love does not throw doles to the perishing, it gives itself. Love never says, 'You carry my burden,' but rather, 'Let me carry your burden.' To the eye of love, man is no longer a mere crank in the great machinery of labour, a unit in the vast mass designated the 'lower classes'--he is a brother. And love will not give a brother over to be the prey of vice, {194} or surrender him as a victim to monopolies that destroy him. Love will sacrifice and fight for the brother's life. The remedy for all our ills lies here--in our return to God. IV To many the preaching of repentance is the dreariest of all things. It is but the voice summoning them to the impossible--to mourn for sins of which they are unconscious. They cry out for life--and they are offered tears. But far from being compact of all weariness and sorrow, repentance is the most thrilling of all that the soul can experience. It is the essence of all romance. For what is it but this--the turning back to God. And in turning to God comes the vision of the glory of life. The eyes are illumined with radiance when they behold no longer processes and laws--but God. Who can compute that enrichment when suddenly the veil is rent and from some hill-top the eyes behold {195} no longer meadow and moorland and the gleam of waters afar, but the Life behind them all--God; and everything created, the green sward and the clouds swimming in glory, the mist-caressed mountains and the great sea heaving in all its waves, become but one vast transparency through which God flashes His splendour on the enraptured soul. And in this return to God the soul is ever led on from glory to glory. That is the alluring power of Christianity. The Shepherd of souls leads us ever on until we come to the Cross and realise that the God of heaven and earth is the God of sacrifice; that His love stoops to agony that He may save. And onward from the Cross He leads until on our enraptured hearts there rises the vision of the Cross abiding still in the heart of God, and our eyes behold over all the universe the sheen of that love which still stoops to death that it may save. As we tread the way back, and go on ever nearer to the hidden fire, we feel the flame of His love filling all our {196} being. And beauties undreamed of leap into light at each bend of the road. To come to God is to journey from death to life. The world has nothing great comparable to this. V