but offers the most favourable conditions for the formation of independent judgement and the growth of individual faith.  How far the movement realizes its ideal, I forbear to inquire, but its very existence affords some evidence of the belief in the positive virtue of toleration as an essential element of the Christian character.  Another powerful factor making for co-operation and better understanding among Christians may be found in the Student Christian movement.  For this country its value has been enhanced if not created by the opening of the older Universities to Nonconformists.  The future leaders of all our Churches are now being educated together, and through the Student Christian movement, they are educating each other and facing together old controversies and inherited problems at a time when their judgements are least hampered either by tradition or responsibility.  What this may mean for the religious life of this country, we cannot yet tell, but it is certain that a new temper will be brought to bear on our divisions.  The men who learn to appreciate one another through this association, tend to hold together when they pass out of the Universities into their life-work.  There are springing up through the Student movement new associations or fellowships which conserve and continue the unifying impetus of the movement itself.  Nor is that unifying power confined to this country.  It forms a world-wide federation whose lines of communication have not been cut even by the present war.  In every land, the Student movement intends to resume international intercourse at the earliest possible moment.  I think it is not simply the bias of a student in favour of his own class, which makes me regard the Student Christian movement as one of the most hopeful developments in the religious life of our age.

Perhaps the influence of this movement itself may be traced in the growing demand for co-operation in the missionary task of the Church.  This demand has no doubt arisen in part through the changes in the means of transport and communication which have made the world a smaller place.  Missionary effort is less sporadic than it was.  The Churches are developing a Weltpolitik.  The exact proportions of the task before them are now more clearly grasped.  The difficulty of overtaking the task even when united, and the impossibility of discharging it effectively while divided are also more apparent.  But the demand for unity and the power of co-operation have also been strengthened by the men and women who have gone abroad under the influence of the Student Volunteer Missionary Union.  High Churchmen and Nonconformist having learnt to work together on a Christian Student executive do not find it difficult to co-operate, where opportunity offers, in India or China.  A half-involuntary revolution of sentiment is proceeding under our eyes.  The strength of the new spirit of co-operation was revealed in the Edinburgh Conference of 1910.  That date will stand out as supremely significant in the growth of a new Catholicism in the West.