or other, has not been struck with the power there is in a single living influence.  Have we never for instance, felt the power wherewith the orator unites and holds together a thousand men as if they were but one; with flashing eyes and throbbing hearts, all attentive to his words, and by the difference of their attitudes, by the variety of the expressions of their countenances testifying to the unity of that single living feeling with which he had inspired them?  Whether it be indignation, whether it be compassion, or whether it be enthusiasm, that one living influence made the thousand for the time, one.  Have we not heard how, even in this century in which we live, the various and conflicting feelings of the people of this country were concentrated into one, when the threat of foreign invasion had fused down and broken the edges of conflict and variance, and from shore to shore was heard one cry of terrible defiance, and the different classes and orders of this manifold and mighty England were as one?  Have we not heard how the mighty winds hold together, as if one, the various atoms of the desert, so that they rush like a living thing, across the wilderness?  And this, brethren, is the unity of the Church of Christ, the subjection to the one uniting spirit of its God.

It will be said, in reply to this, “Why this is mere enthusiasm.  It may be very beautiful in theory, but it is impossible in practice.  It is mere enthusiasm to believe, that while all these varieties of conflicting opinion remain, we can have unity; it is mere enthusiasm to think that so long as men’s minds reckon on a thing like unity, there can be a thing like oneness.”  And our reply is, Give us the Spirit of God, and we shall be one.  You cannot produce a unity by all the rigour of your ecclesiastical discipline.  You cannot produce a unity by consenting in some form of expression such as this, “Let us agree to differ.”  You cannot produce a unity by Parliamentary regulations or enactments, bidding back the waves of what is called aggression.  Give us the living Spirit of God, and we shall be one.

Once on this earth was exhibited, as it were, a specimen of perfect anticipation of such an unity, when the “rushing mighty wind” of Pentecost came down in the tongues of fire and sat on every man; when the Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, the “Cretes and Arabians,” the Jew and the Gentile, each speaking one language, yet blended and fused into one unity by enthusiastic love, heard one another speak as it were, in one language, the manifold works of God; when the spirit of giving was substituted for the spirit of mere rivalry and competition, and no man said the things he had were his own, but all shared in common.  Let that spirit come again, as come it will, and come it must; and then, beneath the influences of a mightier love, we shall have a nobler and a more real unity.

We pass on now, in the second place, to