love of modern Christians?  Alas! alas! to ask the question is to answer it, and everybody knows the answer, and nobody sorrows over it.  Is any duty more pressingly laid upon Christian churches of this generation than that, forgetting their doctrinal janglings for a while, and putting away their sectarianisms and narrowness, they should show the world that their faith has still the power to do what it did in the old times, bridge over the gulf that separates class from class, and bring all men together in the unity of the faith and of the love of Jesus Christ?  Depend upon it, unless the modern organisations of Christianity which call themselves ‘churches’ show themselves, in the next twenty years, a great deal more alive to the necessity, and a great deal more able to cope with the problem, of uniting the classes of our modern complex civilisation, the term of life of these churches is comparatively brief.  And the form of Christianity which another century will see will be one which reproduces the old miracle of the early days, and reaches across the deepest clefts that separate modern society, and makes all one in Jesus Christ.  It is all very well for us to glorify the ancient love of the early Christians, but there is a vast deal of false sentimentality about our eulogistic talk of it.  It were better to praise it less and imitate it more.  Translate it into present life, and you will find that to-day it requires what it nineteen hundred years ago was recognised as manifesting, the presence of something more than human motive, and something more than man discovers of truth.  The cement must be divine that binds men thus together.

Again, these two households suggest for us the tranquillising power of Christian resignation.

They were mostly slaves, and they continued to be slaves when they were Christians.  Paul recognised their continuance in the servile position, and did not say a word to them to induce them to break their bonds.  The Epistle to the Corinthians treats the whole subject of slavery in a very remarkable fashion.  It says to the slave:  ’If you were a slave when you became a Christian, stop where you are.  If you have an opportunity of being free, avail yourself of it; if you have not, never mind.’  And then it adds this great principle:  ’He that is called in the Lord, being a slave, is Christ’s freeman.  Likewise he that is called, being free, is Christ’s slave.’  The Apostle applies the very same principle, in the adjoining verses, to the distinction between circumcision and uncircumcision.  From all which there comes just the same lesson that is taught us by these two households of slaves left intact by Christianity—­viz. that where a man is conscious of a direct, individual relation to Jesus Christ, that makes all outward circumstances infinitely insignificant.  Let us get up to the height, and they all become very small.  Of course, the principles of Christianity killed slavery, but it took eighteen hundred years to do it.  Of course,