we are tempted to say: "No. All those who are outside the shelter of this protecting leaf are outside the mercy of God. If they would know of the goodness of the Lord, they must enter into our habitation. Till they do that God can have nothing to do with them, because they have nothing to do with him." That, I believe, is the danger of the whole church.

We look at the heathen world and cannot deny that there is much in it that is admirable. There are rules of morality that we should do well to know and obey. There is a simplicity and gentleness in the relation of man to man which put to shame our civilized struggle for existence. Then, nearer at home, we find that some of those whose lives are the most earnest and the sweetest are far from the communion of any of the churches. We recognize that year by year the boys and girls, trained in our Sunday-schools, come home from school and college having lost all interest in the church. It would seem as if the result must be fatal to a worthy life, but, as a matter of fact, many of them, as teachers and doctors and social workers, are an example to us all. What are we to say to these things? Have we been mistaken in supposing that the church has helped us? Is it possible that it has finished its work, and that henceforth the great institution which converted the Roman Empire and brought the barbarian invaders of Europe to the discipleship of Christ is about to disappear? And if so, what is to take its place? While it is well for us to consider the facts, we cannot rest content with such a suggestion.

What the churches must learn to-day is that the spirit of Jesus is not confined to the organization. There are multitudes of earnest men and women who have lost all interest in the church but are following Jesus-many of them ignorant of the fact that it is he who is their companion. "Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked with us on the way?" They do not know all that

they might know of him, but they are living in his spirit of sacrifice. One is teaching, and another is healing, and a third is leaving father and mother and devoting the strength of life to making the conditions of life easier and nobler for the poor. They ignore the churches and the churches ignore them. Thus both are losing what each through co-operation might learn.

The facts of the spiritual life are before us. They are manifest in the lives of the heathen; they are evident in the conversation of those who have no association with the churches; and above all, they are to be seen in the lives of those who are members of every one of the churches. These are facts. But too often the ecclesiastical mind prefers to begin with a theory and say: "No church which has not a 'valid' ministry, or which has abandoned the primitive form of administering baptism, or is unable to point to the exact day and hour when its members were converted, can have the spirit of Christ." Of course, then there can be no end to the controversy.

Now, all Christians do believe that the fruits of the spirit can be found only where Christ is present; all are ready to say, "If any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his"; but too often the corollary that "If any man have the spirit of Christ he is his" is overlooked. St. Paul, who was a great expert in the human soul, says: "The fruits of the spirit are manifest, which are these, love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, meekness. Against such there is no law." May we not add: "Against such there is no argument"?

If these be the facts-and they cannot be controverted -might it not be well for us to ask ourselves, not what is the theory to which we are bound, but what are the facts of life, and what is our duty in relation to them? It used to be said by some good men that the people outside the communion of the church to which they belonged were outside the "covenanted mercies of God." They did not

ask themselves what those words meant; they simply used a formula which explains nothing. That time has now gone by, but we are not clear as to what we ought to say and do. It is that confusion which is one of the causes of the impotence of the churches.

I venture to suggest that what we ought to say to ourselves is that we are thinking of our churches as Jonah thought of his gourd. It has been our refuge and protection, but all along God has been providing other refuges for those who are not under the shadow of our "gourd." For, if we do not say that willingly, we may be driven to it by bitter experience, and though we escape the anger which poisoned the heart of the prophet, we shall continue to be perplexed until we begin to doubt if there be any refuge for the soul of man.

There is another fact which has been impressed upon us by the experience of recent years, and that is that the wind of the world is blowing upon our "gourd" and the worm of criticism is gnawing at its root. These considerations should lead us to ask if our experience may not be the same as Jonah's? It may be that God will destroy our refuge if we do not use it for the good of mankind instead of as a refuge for ourselves. Not a few are deeply concerned; they see that their church is not to their children what it has been to them, and they are filled with despair and believe the evil is in their children instead of in themselves. They do not, indeed, say with the prophet, "I do well to be angry even unto death," but failing to see the signs of the times, they have no great expectation of better things. They cannot believe that

"Our little systems have their day,

They have their day and cease to be,

And thou, O God, art more than they."

To admit that God fulfils himself in many ways seems equivalent to saying that he never has fulfilled himself in

any way. It seems to them that there can be but one way of God's manifestation of the truth, even that way which is consonant with a theory which they had learned to identify with revelation itself. Some, like the great Cardinal Newman, or like a recent learned and good bishop of the Episcopal Church, believing that their own "gourd," which had been their comfort and protection, is about to wither away, seek for another "gourd" whose roots, they think, strike deeper and whose branches evidently spread wider, and there, they think, they shall be at peace. It may be so; but it will be because they are able to rest in something less than the revelation of God's goodness in their own day. Others, like Newman's brother, or like Samuel Butler, finding the church, as it had been represented to them, to be no dwelling-place for the growing soul, turn from all the churches with disgust and mock at those who do not follow them.

This ancient parable has a word to us to-day. It would tell us that we too are on the eve of a great revelationthe revelation of the goodness of God throughout the whole earth, and that the duty of the church is to bear witness to that truth by which alone the world can be saved.

No doubt there are good men and women who will say: "Supposing this to be true, what is the conclusion of the whole matter? If this exposition of the parable of Jonah be true, then it follows that there is no real difference between heathendom and Christendom, between those who know Jesus as their Saviour and those who know him not; no difference between the church which has held to the ancient order and preserved the faith once delivered to the saints and a sect which has sprung up like a mushroom and has no root that will abide. All that will be left is an invertebrate religious sentimentality, without law or order or definite teaching—that is, without authority."

Before considering these objections in detail, would it not be well to ask ourselves whether the interpretation of

the parable here given is or is not in accordance with the mind of Christ? One has only to open the gospels to see. When the religious teachers of the day gathered about Jesus and saw the mighty works which he did, they could not deny the facts. Therefore they advanced a theory; they said: "He does these things by the power of Beelzebub." But Jesus said: "To attribute any good work to any agency save the spirit of God is to be in danger of the sin against the Holy Ghost." If the facts would not fit their theory, and they did not, then the theory must be changed. Theory is man's interpretation of fact. It is necessarily fallible, but facts are the immutable acts of God. If the fruits of the spirit manifested in all the churches are not the result of the presence of God, then no one of us has valid ground for his belief that he himself is in communion with God.

There are multitudes of Christians who do not face the facts of spiritual experience, and therefore do not feel the force of this inexorable logic. They hold tenaciously to theories which they have inherited, and while they do not go so far, at least in the Protestant churches, as to deny that God's mercy is being manifested in other churches than their own, they are suspicious, unsympathetic, and sometimes even contemptuous of those who do not follow them. Is not this a modern form of the sin against the Holy Ghost? If the facts were faced, might not the spiritual unity which all good men declare they desire be found by following a new path? It is to indicate the new way of Christian unity that this book has been written.