his creatures.  His eldest son, his very likeness, was the first of the family-peace-makers.  Preaching peace to them that were afar off and them that were nigh, he stood undefended in the turbulent crowd of his fellows, and it was only over his dead body that his brothers began to come together in the peace that will not be broken.  He rose again from the dead; his peace-making brothers, like himself, are dying unto sin; and not yet have the evil children made their father hate, or their elder brother flinch.

On the other hand, those whose influence is to divide and separate, causing the hearts of men to lean away from each other, make themselves the children of the evil one:  born of God and not of the devil, they turn from God, and adopt the devil their father.  They set their God-born life against God, against the whole creative, redemptive purpose of his unifying will, ever obstructing the one prayer of the first-born—­that the children may be one with him in the Father.  Against the heart-end of creation, against that for which the Son yielded himself utterly, the sowers of strife, the fomenters of discord, contend ceaseless.  They do their part with all the other powers of evil to make the world which the love of God holds together—­a world at least, though not yet a family—­one heaving mass of dissolution.  But they labour in vain.  Through the mass and through it, that it may cohere, this way and that, guided in dance inexplicable of prophetic harmony, move the children of God, the lights of the world, the lovers of men, the fellow-workers with God, the peace-makers—­ever weaving, after a pattern devised by, and known only to him who orders their ways, the web of the world’s history.  But for them the world would have no history; it would vanish, a cloud of windborne dust.  As in his labour, so shall these share in the joy of God, in the divine fruition of victorious endeavour.  Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be called the children of God—­the children because they set the Father on the throne of the Family.

The main practical difficulty, with some at least of the peace-makers, is, how to carry themselves toward the undoers of peace, the disuniters of souls.  Perhaps the most potent of these are not those powers of the church visible who care for canon and dogma more than for truth, and for the church more than for Christ; who take uniformity for unity; who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, nor knowing what spirit they are of; such men, I say, are perhaps neither the most active nor the most potent force working for the disintegration of the body of Christ.  I imagine also that neither are the party-liars of politics the worst foes to divine unity, ungenerous, and often knowingly false as they are to their opponents, to whom they seem to have no desire to be honest and fair.  I think, rather, they must be the babbling liars of the social circle, and the faithless brothers and unloving sisters of disunited human families.