When Ambrose looked up, the youth, the vases, and the stream were gone; but he knew he had talked with an angel, and his heart was changed. I wish that angel would come and do a great deal of preaching to our English Ambroses. LXXX. “There is no doubt,” as Lord Russell says, “that concession gives rise to demands for fresh concession, and it is right that it should be so. The true limit is, that all it is just to concede should be conceded; all that it is true to affirm should be affirmed; but that which is false should be denied.” Besides this power of concession, which she has in a much greater degree than any other religious body, the English Church, if she be a Catholic Church, as she pretends to be, has also greater power of assimilation. Let her not be afraid of those sides of the truth which have been most prominently put forward by other religious communities. She can assimilate them if she pleases, and it is her duty to assimilate whatever is true in them. Her mission in this world is not to hold her own in the sense of resisting all reform, of resisting all concession, but her duty and her mission is to go to the lost people of our country, and of every country where she is established or where she exists, and to draw those together into her fold who cannot get into that of other religious bodies, which have such limits as I have been speaking of to bar the gates of admission. Her great mission is to seek and save those which are lost in every community. The highest title of her ministers is _Servi servorum Dei_ (the servants of the servants of God), and, if she remembers this high mission, if she endeavors by her life to exemplify her Master’s spirit and to illustrate His life, she never need be afraid of disestablishment or disendowment. What did the greatest of churchmen who ever lived say on the point of people carrying on those miserable squabbles that are dividing us in this day? They were saying, “We are of Paul,” “We are of Apollos,” “We are of Peter?” and he said, “Who is Paul? Who is Apollos? Who is Peter?” If you only understand to what an inheritance you are called to, “all things are yours, whether Paul, or Apollos, or Peter, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come, all are yours, for ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.” LXXXI. It is said by some, as I think, unwise defenders of the faith, that a colorless Christianity is no Christianity at all, that you can have no church without a definite creed. To the first I would reply that, after all, the bright white light is, in its purity, better than all color. To the second, I admit that every church must have a definite creed, but the more simple and broad that creed is the better. It is only the simplest creed which can give us the unity, or the tolerance in diversity, for which all good men are longing. LXXXII.