One of my earliest lessons in French, when I was at school at Neuwied on the Rhine, where we had to learn many fables and moral poems by heart, both in French and German, was the story of a father who knowing that he had not long to live, called his children together and bade each of them go and cut a hazel rod and bring it to him. The rods he bade them tie in one bundle, and then he told them to try and break the sheaf of sticks. They could not do this. Next he ordered each to take his rod and break it, which of course was an easy matter. “Now,” said he, “the lesson I want to teach you is combination and united effort. So long as you keep together, you will do something; if you separate, you fail utterly.” To co-operate means, of course, to work together. “Two are better far than one, for counsel or for fight,” says an old and well-known hymn, and a poet has written that even “Heaven’s gate is shut to him that comes alone, Save thou a soul, and it shall save thine own.” Perhaps one of the chief causes of spiritual deterioration in Christians has been that fallacy that one can worship God as well alone as in the congregations of the faithful. “Forget not the assembling of yourselves together” we read in the Book of books. Again the gracious presence of our Lord is especially promised “where two or three are gathered together.” One of the saddest stories that I ever read is that of two maiden sisters who lived in one large room in Edinburgh. They quarrelled about something, and so bitter was the animosity engendered that they never spoke to each other again, although they continued to live in the same room for many years. Perhaps they were too poor to live in separate apartments; or they may have had that proverbial Scotch decency and reserve that prevented them from publishing their quarrel to their little world, as an open separation would have done. They drew a chalk line across their joint domain, which ran from the middle of the fireplace to the centre of the doorway, and they cooked and ate their separate miserable meals and went in and out in solitary fashion, and probably grimly observed each other kneel down in prayer (_sic_) to her Maker. Perhaps in the silence of the night hours one would lie wakeful, with bated breath, listening to the unconscious breathing of her sleeping sister. Could anything be more dreadful? Whether they died thus, the one left alone in a room with lips that were finally sealed in death, the story does not reveal; it is left half told. “See that ye fall not out by the way,” was Joseph’s wise counsel to his brethren. “Two are better than one.... For if they fall the one will lift up his fellow; but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up ... and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” So said the preacher in Ecclesiastes iv. The old words are very forcible in their quaint simplicity.