ration, or body of men who have lost their personal differences, and have become parts of one vast and mysterious whole, all merging their individualities in the unity of the Catholic and indivisible Church, which is purchased with the blood of the Lamb. Nor is this conception a hopeless one, if it be rightly understood. We know how by the power of love many discordant and varying elements can be brought into holy accord, and that the great watchword of the ransomed is "Peace on earth, goodwill to man." It is reasonable to hope that when the common danger has driven all classes of men to one shelter, and heavily-laden souls find in the recognition of their personal relation to the eternal Son of God the hope of deliverance from the burden of sin and from the misery of existence, they may sink all personal differences and hush all mutual strife, and prove to the wide universe that they are all one in Christ Jesus. Beautiful, reasonable, sublime as is the idea of a Catholic unity, undisturbed from the moment when the 'two or three' first gathered in the name of Jesus and found Him in the midst of them; the historian of human life and progress has a sad and melancholy task when he turns from the idea to the reality. Alas! the fiercest strifes among men have been quickened by the dovelike spirit of the gospel. Hostility, schism, misapprehension, mutual exclusion from the benefits of the Divine Father's love, hatred, persecution, martyrdoms are the strange accompaniments of the religion of love. Not content with words, not satisfied with

sword and fire, and deadly rage, those who should all have been one in Christ Jesus have actually called hell from beneath to do their hateful bidding on their foes, and done their best to blast the eternal life of each other, with threats and execrations, savouring more of Pandemonium than of the Church of the living God. Is Christianity then a mistake? is Christian love an impossibility? is it only a dream of the enthusiast, never to be realized on earth? God forbid! There is another way of looking even at some of these facts, which-whatever may be the profession of any one party, however deeply a man may be cursed, even for the charity that "hopeth all things, endureth all things, believeth all things"-may make each one of us a part of this undivided whole. In order that we may rise to the point of view where we may contemplate the life of God in the soul as independent of the fundamental distinctions arising among men, let us consider those distinctions, and the classes of difficulties which are placed in the way of all fellowship and unity of whatever kind, and which will therefore make their appearance within the bosom even of the one mystical body of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are three classes of obstacles to all union, and therefore to Christian union, and to the realization of the wondrous prayer of the Lord Jesus. These difficulties arise out of a threefold distinction that may be made among human beings. The Apostle Paul, in my text, does in three different ways divide mankind. He makes a threefold sepa

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ration of the human race into two dissimilar classes, which, though here and there correspondent with one another, are by no means parallel the one to the other. This classification is governed by (1) the great intellectual differences and antagonisms among men; (2) the chief emotional and constitutional differences of character, and (3) the prodigious distinctions effected by external circumstances. It is true that St. Paul' presents these three antitheses in a pictorial fashion, in a vivid and concrete form before our consideration, but it is none the less obvious that he is thinking of more than the literal meaning of his own words.

I. The first of these divisions was based on that great antagonism which was so admirably expressed in the Apostle's day by the intellectual differences obtaining between the Jew and the Greek. The Jew, strictly speaking, was the member of the holy family, the descendant of Abraham and Israel, a representative of that well-known nationality which had better reasons than any other Oriental people possessed, to believe that it was the special object of Divine care, and providence, and government. The Jew justly gloried in a marvellous history of sublime and matchless deeds; he could boast the possession of a literature which was absolutely peerless in its moral teaching, in its combination of the human and the divine, in its surprising details of deliverance, in its sacred minstrelsy, and in its power to arouse and to soothe the conscience, to wound and to heal the heart. He could claim that the first

appearance in human literature of a distinct recognition of the unity of God was found in his sacred books; he could point to his Bible and his history for the only rational explanation of sacrifice, the only adequate presentation of worship; and he was the subject of a marvellous hope that the whole world would accept his traditions, submit to his ritual, receive his dogmas, and ultimately yield to his sway. He promised to mankind its greatest King, its perfect sacrifice, its universal temple. By psalmist and chronicler, by sybil and seer, by ceremony and prophecy, he foretold a Messiah, a religion, a redemption, a resurrection to his fellow-man. Like the bush which burned with fire and was unconsumed, none of the terrible reverses which befel his country crushed his confidence in his creed, or extinguished the hope of his race. In St. Paul's day the Jew was a settler in all the commercial cities and chief resorts of the Roman empire, and became a world-wide witness for the covenant which God had made with his nation and the world. The blandishments of philosophy and luxury, the insults of tyrannic fanaticism, the despotism of bad rulers, and the intestine strife of his own people, did not obliterate the pages of his Bible, or succeed in changing his national characteristics. Wherever we find him, we see the same tenacious adherence to traditional observance, the same pride of birth, and some of the same dogmatism and impatience of novelty. Living in the past, glorying in the sense of an infallible wisdom, satis

fied with self, convinced of the justness of his own ideas, with limited though suggestive views of the character of God and the mode of His revelation, he laid down à priori principles for the divine procedure; and in face of a world in arms, maintained the ground which had been won for him by the heroism, the great deeds, and greater faith of his

ancestors.

Now Christianity is a glorification, a transfiguration of Judaism. Judaism was a long, predestined, divine preparation for the coming of the Son of David; and the Jew often accepted the Christ as such, not always fully understanding that the Son of David was the Son of man, that Jesus could not be the Son of man without being indeed the Son of God. When the Jew entered the Christian church, he brought with him his age-long attachment to the external rite, to the holy place, to the consecrated thing, to the traditional dogma. While the Apostles reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, the Jew was saying to his fellow-believers, "Except ye be circumcised and keep the law of Moses, ye cannot be saved." While the great gospel of pardon was proclaimed through the blood of the Lamb, the Jew was seeking a sign. Amid the convulsions which rocked his nation to its foundation, levelled his temple and his hopes to the ground, proved the baselessness of many of his demands and professions, and gave the great sign that the end of the old mode of recognising the divine kingdom was nigh, and that the