The Roman Catholic chaplain in the next hospital, a most consecrated and earnest man, has managed to get a military rule passed that no services can be held in any ward of the hospital unless every Roman Catholic patient is bodily carried out.  This has successfully prevented the holding of any Christian services whatsoever, Catholic or Protestant.  Throughout the entire war we have never known of a single instance of any man trying to proselytize or to divert a soldier from allegiance to his own church.  We have known of men leaving the churches altogether during the war, but not one instance of a man’s changing his church or being asked to do so.  Yet the jealousy and suspicion of the bare possibility of men’s doing so has blocked and excluded much genuine Christian work.

To give another instance—­a personal friend of the writer, a young Anglican clergyman, a widely known college principal, was serving in one of the huts of a Convalescent Camp.  He had made the acquaintance of the patients in some twelve wards and was going the rounds every morning telling the war news, giving oranges to the fevered, and cheering up the depressed.  The Commandant came with apologies and told him that although he was doing the best Christian work in the hospital it must be discontinued, as the chaplain objected.  Our friend, who was a clergyman of the same communion as the chaplain, called upon him and asked if he had any objection to the distribution of fruit.  He replied that if our friend did this it would give an unfair advantage to his work as his particular organization would get the credit, and that he, as the chaplain, must “push his own show.”  To continue in the words of our friend:  “Then I asked him if I could send the fruit through the lady workers or the hut orderlies, or the ‘Tommies’ who were friends of the wounded.  But he refused all.  So I asked him if he would distribute them if I gave them.  This he agreed to, and I have sent them to him since then.  But he is too busy.”  The oranges were not distributed, and our friend concludes:  “I am out against the whole principle on which he acts.  I don’t think he is much to be blamed.  He is one of the best; a keen, hard-working, pleasant man, zealous for his ‘own show,’ and in its interests doing much for the men.  And in his principle of action he is not an exception, but a common type of the Anglican padre as I have met them in many lands.  They are trained and encouraged to ’push their own show.’  But this keenness on one’s ‘own show’ rather than on men, is the very essence of the sin of schism, and the very root of Pharisaism.  Now, as a rule, all the sects stand for their ‘own show’ first, and men know it.  I am ashamed to be a parson today.  Men were not made for any Church, but the Church for them.”  Here again, which of us is without sin, and who can throw the first stone at his brother, or at other branches of the sadly divided Church of Christ?