more I became absorbed in the people of New York City, the closer became my fellowship with other ministers similarly absorbed, and the remoter my fellowship with those who were bound to me only by the accident of the Unitarian tradition.  More and more my hand and heart went out directly to men who saw and labored for the better day of which I dreamed; and only indirectly to those with whom I was appointed to serve, but who could not or would not catch the vision of my dreams.  An irreconcilable conflict was here being joined—­the old, old conflict between a dead and a living fellowship.  It was my intuitive, although unconscious knowledge of this fact, which made me a rebel in every Unitarian gathering of the last ten years.  It was a similarly unconscious instinct of self-preservation which taught my Unitarian brethren, to whom the old association was still central, to resent the things I sought.  We had been born together, and we lived together; our past and our present were joint possessions.  But when we faced the future, we divided; my [12] colleagues, many of them, were content with old, familiar ways, while I sought new associations.

What was dimly felt in those days, was suddenly transformed into something clearly seen by the impact of the Great War.  If this stupendous conflict has revealed anything in religion, it is that the sectarian divisions of Christendom are no longer to be tolerated.  In the fusing fires of battle, Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopalian, Unitarian, even Catholic, Protestant and Jew, have been melted, and now flow in a single flaming stream into the mould which shall fashion them into a single casting.  Man after man has returned from the front, to tell us that the denominational church is dead.  A new ordering of Christendom is at hand.  The unit of organization will be not the one belief, nor even the one spirit, but the one field of service.  Not the sect, but the community, will be the nucleus of integration.  We will have groupings not of Methodist churches, and Baptist churches, and Unitarian churches, to remind the world of ancient differences, but of New York churches, and Boston churches, and San Francisco churches, to teach the world of present needs and future hopes.  Our churches will be related as the wards in a city are related, or the cities in a state, or the states in the nation.  We shall be all Christians together, as we are all Americans together.  We shall have different religious ideas as we have different political ideas.  But we shall be organized religiously, as well as politically, in a single community.  Our churches, like our schools, will be the possession, and the resort, of all!