of experience of life; what holds them together is the pursuit of common objects, the objects that we sum up as amusement.  Now the Christians in a community certainly have a common object, the cultivation of the spiritual life through the supernatural means offered by the Church of God.  One would think that this object would have a more constraining power than the attractions of motoring or golf; but in fact we know that this is not so save in individual cases.  There is not, that is to say, anywhere visible a Christian community which is wrought into a unity by the solidifying forces of its professed ideals.  Those very people whose paths converge week by week until they meet at this altar, as they leave the altar, follow diverging paths and live in isolation for the rest of their time.

One of the constant problems of the Church is that of the loss of those who have for a time been associated with it—­of those who have for a time seemed to recognise their duty to God, and their privileges as members of His Son.  They drift away into the world.  We pray and meditate and worry over this and try to invent some machinery which will overcome it.  But it cannot be overcome by machinery, especially by the sort of machinery which consists in transferring the amusements that people find in the world bodily into the Church itself.  It cannot and will not be overcome until a Christian society has been created which is bound together by the interests of the Kingdom of God, and in which those interests are so predominant as to throw into the shade and practically annihilate other interests.  And especially must such spiritual interests be strong enough to break down all social barriers so that the cultured and refined can find a common ground with the uneducated and socially untrained in the spiritual privileges that they share in common.  When the banker can talk with his chauffeur of their common experience in prayer, and the banker’s wife and her cook can confer on their mutual difficulties in making a meditation, then we shall have got within sight of a Christian society; but at present, while these have no spiritual contact, it is not within sight.  The primitive Christian community in Jerusalem made the attempt at having all things in common.  Their mistake seems to have been that they, like other and more modern people, by “all things” understood money.  You cannot build any society which is worth the name on money, a Church least of all.  It is unimportant whether a man is rich or poor; what is important is his spiritual accomplishment:  and it is common spiritual aims and accomplishments which should make up the “all things” which possessed in common will form the basis of an enduring unity.  But not until accomplishment becomes the supreme interest of life can we expect to get out of the impasse in which we at present find ourselves; in which, that is, the person can be converted to Christianity and enter into union with God in Christ and become a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven, and wake to find himself isolated from his old circle by his profession of new principles; but not, by his new principles, truly united to his fellow citizens in the Kingdom of God!  One is tempted to write, What a comedy; but before one can do so, realises that it is in fact a tragedy!