very varieties by which they have approached this proving them to be one.  Disjoint them and then you have some miserable sect—­Calvinism, or Unitarianism; the unity has dispersed.  And so again with the unity of the Churches.  Whereby would we produce unity?  Would we force on other Churches our Anglicanism?  Would we have our thirty-nine articles, our creeds, our prayers, our rules and regulations, accepted by every Church throughout the world?  If that were unity, then in consistency you are bound to demand that in God’s world there shall be but one colour instead of the manifold harmony and accordance of which this universe is full; that there should be but one chaunted note—­the one which we conceive most beautiful.  This is not the unity of the Church of God.  The various Churches advance different doctrines and truths.  The Church of Germany something different from those of the Church of England.  The Church of Rome, even in its idolatry, proclaims truths which we would be glad to seize.  By the worship of the Virgin, the purity of women; by the rigour of ecclesiastical ordinances, the sanctity and permanence of eternal order; by the very priesthood itself, the necessity of the guidance of man by man.  Nay, even the dissenting bodies themselves—­mere atoms of aggregates as they are—­stand forward and proclaim at least this truth, the separateness of the individual conscience, the right of independence.

Peace subsists not between things exactly alike.  We do not speak of peace in a single country.  We say peace subsists between different countries where war might be.  There can be no peace between two men who agree in everything; peace subsists between those who differ.  There is no peace between Baptist and Baptist; so far as they are Baptists, there is perfect accordance and agreement.  There may be peace between you and the Romanist, the Jew, or the Dissenter, because there are angles of sharpness which might come into collision if they were not subdued and softened by the power of love.  It was given to the Apostle Paul to discern that this was the ground of unity.  In the Church of Christ he saw men with different views, and he said So far from that variety destroying unity, it was the only ground of unity.  There are many doctrines, all of them different, but let those varieties be blended together—­in other words, let there be the peace of love, and then you will have unity.

Once more this unity, whereof the apostle speaks, consists in submission to one single influence or spirit.  Wherein consists the unity of the body?  Consists it not in this,—­that there is one life uniting, making all the separate members one?  Take away the life, and the members fall to pieces:  they are no longer one; decomposition begins, and every element separates, no longer having any principle of cohesion or union with the rest.

There is not one of us who, at some time