Christ, so strongly felt as to enable them to forget all worldly distinctions.  Their sense of redemption was strong.  They thrilled with the joy of deliverance from the old life “after the flesh.”  They knew that they were regenerate, new creations, and that this was the distinction of the brother who knelt beside them at their communions.  It mattered not at all what he was in the world, whether he were Greek or Barbarian, whether he were patrician or freedman, whether he were of the slaves of Rome or of Caesar’s household.  The man who knelt to receive his communion might be a great nobleman, the priest who communicated him might be a slave:  that did not matter; the significant thing was that they were both one in Jesus Christ.

That did not last.  I suppose that it could not be expected to last in an unconverted or half converted world.  It could only last on condition of the fairly complete isolation of the Christian group from the rest of society, pending the conversion of society as a whole.  But it proved impossible to secure the isolation.  The only real isolation was in monastic groups which naturally could contain only such men and women as God called to a special sort of life:  the whole of society could not be so organised.  As the Church grew and took in the various social constituents included in the Empire, it took them in differentiated as they were.  There seems to have been no real effort to break down race distinctions or class distinctions.  There were no doubt protests, but the protests were as ineffective then as now.  “You cannot change human nature,” men say; but that in fact is precisely what Christianity claims to do.  Unless it can change human nature it is a failure.

The ideal of Christianity is not the abolition of inequality (only a certain sort of social theorists are insane enough to expect that).  All men are born unequal in a variety of ways, physical, intellectual, moral; and under any form of society that so far has been invented they are born in social classes which remain very hard realities in spite of our theories.  What Christianity aims at accomplishing is to transcend these inequalities, natural and artificial, by raising men to a state of spiritual equality, a state which ensures true and full enjoyment of all the privileges of the child of God.  In this state there is open to all the gift of sanctifying grace which is the possession of God now, and in the future will unfold into the capacity of the complete participation of the life of heaven.  This belongs to, is within the grasp of, any child, any ignorant peasant, any toiler, as much as it is within the grasp of bishop or priest or Religious.  And this much—­and how much it is!—­the Church has succeeded in accomplishing.  It may be slow in offering the riches of the Gospel to the unconverted world, but where it has presented the Gospel, it presents it to all men as a Gospel of salvation and sanctification.  When tempted to discouragement let us remember that whatever the shortcoming of the Church, it is yet true that every man, woman and child in these United States of America can through its instrumentality, become a saint whenever he desires.  But, naturally, to become a saint, effort is necessary.