In matters of rank and race and colour all our denominations retain this Apostolic Catholicity. How inconsistent to maintain it there, and repudiate it when we come to such differences as mostly separate us! These are differences far more of temper than of creed, or even of worship or government. We say, sometimes, that we are "one in spirit": not so; it is just in spirit that we have been divided. In creed and organisation both, and in temper as well, the Church of Apostolic times was visibly one. "See how these Christians love one another" was the comment of the heathen onlooker. This state of things continued for a long time. Gibbon enumerates the Church's "unity and discipline," which go together, as among the "secondary causes" of that wonderful spread of the Gospel in the first three centuries. The revived, broadened, and more candid study, alike of the New Testament and of Church History throughout its entire course, is one of the ways in which the Good Shepherd has been leading us to see alike the disobedience of our divisions, and the small foundation there is for many of the points over which we have been fighting. Happily too, we do not now need to argue in favour of visible and organic unity. "The once popular apologies for separation which asserted the sufficiency of 'spiritual' union, and the stimulating virtues of rivalry and competition, have become obsolete." More happily still, we have learned practically to appreciate the difference between our Saviour's gentle I must lead ([Greek: dei me agagein]) and our forefathers' various attempts to produce "uniformity" by driving. The reproach of that sinful blunder is one that none of our greater Churches--Roman, Anglican, Presbyterian, or Puritan--can cast in another's teeth. Each of us committed it in our day of triumph. "What fruit had we then in those things whereof we are now ashamed?" The memory--one-sided, and carefully cultivated--of what each suffered in its turn of adversity has hitherto been a potent agency for keeping us apart. To-day those memories are fading. I was much struck by a remark I heard last spring from the Bishop of Southwark, that one reason why we are more ready nowadays to contemplate reunion is just that we belong to a generation to whom those miserable doings are far-off things outside alike our experience and our expectation. In other ways also we discern leadings of Our Saviour to the same end.