the mutual encouragement and self-sacrifice, never a note of despair, but always the exultation of the Great Fight, and the promise of a great victory.  This is a finer company than a mere casual alliance; yet it makes the uninspired pause, wondering and questioning.  These men are earnest men of different creeds; still they are as intimately bound to one another as if they knelt at the one altar.  In the narrow view the creeds should be at one another’s throats; here they are marching shoulder to shoulder.  How is this?  And the one whose creed is the most exacting could, perhaps, give the best reply.  He would reply that within the sphere in which they work together the true thing that unites them can be done only the one right way; that instinctively seizing this right way they come together; that this is the line of advance to wider and deeper things that are his inspiration and his life; that if a comrade is roused to action by the nearer task, and labours bravely and rightly for it, he is on the road to widening vistas in his dream that now he may not see.  That is what he would say whose vision of life is the widest.  All objectors he may not satisfy.  That what is life to him may leave his comrade cold is a difficulty; but against the difficulty stand the depth and reality of their comradeship, proven by mutual sacrifice, endurance, and faith, and he never doubts that their bond union will sometime prove to have a wise and beautiful meaning in the Annals of God.

III

But the men of different creeds who stand firmly and loyally together are a minority.  We are faced with the great difficulty of uniting as a whole North and South; and we are faced with the grim fact that many whom we desire to unite are angrily repudiating a like desire, that many are sarcastically noting this, that many are coldly refusing to believe; while through it all the most bitter are emphasising enmity and glorifying it.  All these unbelievers keep insisting North and South are natural enemies and must so remain.  The situation is further embittered by acts of enmity being practised by both sides to the extreme provocation of the faithful few.  Their forbearance will be sorely tried, and this is the final test of men.  By those who cling to prejudice and abandon self-restraint, extol enmity, and always proceed to the further step—­the plea to wipe the enemy out:  the counter plea for forbearance is always scorned as the enervating gospel of weakness and despair.  Though we like to call ourselves Christian, we have no desire for—­nay even make a jest of—­that outstanding Christian virtue; yet men not held by Christian dogma have joyously surrendered to the sublimity of that divine idea.  Hear Shelley speak:  “What nation has the example of the desolation of Attica by Mardonius and Xerxes, or the extinction of the Persian Empire by Alexander of Macedon restrained from outrage?  Was not the pretext for this latter system of spoliation