Where the Church has failed is not in the offer of salvation and sanctity, but in removing some of of the obvious obstacles to its attainment by many to whom it appeals, to whom its divine mission is.  It has not succeeded in convincing us that we are members one of another, that is, it has not succeeded in persuading us to act upon what we profess in any broad way.  The Church is not a fellowship in any comprehensive sense.  The divisions which run through secular society and divide group from group run through it also.  The parish which should be the exemplification of the Christian brotherhood in action is not so.  Too often a parish is known as the parish of a certain social group.  There are parishes to which people go to get “into society.”  Very likely they do not succeed, but that is the sort of impression that the parish membership has made upon them.  Then there are parishes to which people “in society” would not be transferred.  There are churches in which no poor person would set foot, not that they would be unwelcome, but that they would feel out of place.  So long as such things are true, our practice of brotherhood has not much to commend of it.

And when we go about setting things right I am not sure that we do not mostly make them worse.  I do not believe that it is the business of the Church to set about the abolition of inequalities and the getting rid of the distinctions between man and man.  Apart from the waste of time due to attempting the impossible, what would be gained?  Pending the arrival of the social millenium we need to do something; and that something, it seems to me a mistake to assume must be social.  “We must bring people together”:  but what is gained by bringing people together when they do not want to be together, and will not actually get together when you force them into proximity.  There is nothing more expressive of the failure of well-meant activity than a church gathering where people at once group themselves along the familiar lines and decline to mix, notwithstanding the utmost endeavours of clergy and zealous ladies to bring them together.  The thing is an object lesson of wrong method.

Is there a right method?  There must be, though no one seems to have found it yet.  There is in any case a right point of departure in our common membership in Jesus Christ.  Suppose we drop the supposition that we make, I presume because we think it pious, that if they are both Christians a dock labourer ought to be quite at home at a millionaire’s dinner party, or a scrub-woman in a box at the Metropolitan opera house.  Suppose we drop the attempt to force people together on lines which will be impossible till after the social revolution has buried us all in a common grave, and fasten attention on the one fact that, from our present point of view, counts, the fact that we are Christians.  Suppose one learns to meet all men and all women simply on the basis of their religion; when that forms the bond