dimensions of the cradle in which its infancy was rocked, perishing before it was given opportunity to lift up its voice in the world's highways and byways? The apostle's answer is my text. It is the word of a super-statesman. Breaking all purely human bounds, it voices the genius of Heaven and earth. After looking the world's untoward facts squarely in the face, Paul dauntlessly grasps the higher, the larger, the completing realities of Christ. For the twanging, clanging discords of men and nations, he substitutes the higher unity revealed in his Lord and Master.

I

By way of approaching the higher unity, let us consider, first, the discords of history. What are their roots, their causes? Are they not begotten by the perversion of the truth contained in this text? What produces, for example, racial discord, altogether aside from natural intellectual antagonisms, moral and political differences? Certainly each race owes its existence to the same God. Nobody disputes the truth that Jew, Greek, Slav, Teuton, Frank, Anglo-Saxon, one and all, have the same Creator. Then why are they not able to live together in peace in this great household named the world? That, of course, is a question that goes to the very heart of the philosophy of history. It will hardly be answered in a sermon or in many volumes. But

of this much we are sure, and up to this point, the question gets itself answered: Racial discords are engendered and accentuated when one race, or one nation, wantonly trespasses upon the inherent rights and individuality of another race or nation. It could not be otherwise so long as human nature is what it is. Nations have an individuality just as persons have an individuality. Therefore, nations, races, have the God-given right to live their own life; but no race, no nation, has the right to autocratically impose its life upon another race or nation. A nation may assume that it has such a right; a people may become so conceited, so chauvinistic, so fanatical over their own methods of life as to sincerely believe that they are called of God to force, to impose, literally, their national habits upon another people. But such fanaticism invariably results in disaster. It is the old, old weakness of ignoring the viewpoint of the other man. Because, as an individual, I entertain certain convictions, adhere to certain religious and political principles, believe in certain social doctrines, why that is no absolutely valid argument for my neighbour entertaining them. While mine may be superior to his, they may be inferior. More fundamental still, and deeper than any logical or intellectual aspect of the matter, my neighbour likes to do his own thinking, prefers to do his own voting, believes in living his own life. If he is wrong and I am right, it is my privilege to be a religious, political, or intellectual

missionary and try to convert him; but what right have I to shoot him, or shell him, or slander him?

Now a nation is made up of individuals, and out of these individuals comes a definite national consciousness, a distinct racial individuality that cannot be imposed upon with impunity. For races live and move and have their being in God, God designs that each shall make a specific contribution to the life of the whole, even though at stated epochs nations undertake to break away from God, sell themselves to do evil, and are dehumanized in the hell of war. I think of God and the nations as I do of New York Bay and the various craft upon its waters. Looking out my study window, I see tugs, yachts, barges, launches, ocean liners, and sometimes a dreadnought. But the water treats them all alike; it fits the shape and size of every one. Furthermore, over its liquid streets every vessel may glide on to its haven. But just let the launch get in the way of the tugboat, or the tugboat in the way of the palatial ship, or the ship in the way of the dreadnought, and there is ruin and disaster. But is the water responsible for the wreckage? Not at all. The water treats its floating children impartially, opens its silvery paths to serve each, offers a billowy roadway for all to reach their respective goals. Who, then, but the pilot-barring storm and unavoidable accidents-is responsible for his vessel's safety? He is the guiding spirit, the boat

is the obedient body, and it moves in whatever direction he wills.

The defects of the simile are patent enough. A personal God cannot be likened unto an impersonal element named water; the long, sinuous windings of a nation's career are not so simple as a vessel's journey from port to port; nor is the spirit of a living people happily compared unto an automatic, lifeless thing such as a boat. And yet, notwithstanding its obvious defects, I am not sure that my illustration should be discounted entirely. For that figure of the pilot, not merely of boats but of states, looms so large, and his acts reach so far, that he must be reckoned with. In a word, it is when the pilot turns pirate that the sea is a place of anarchy and chaos; and it is when the leaders of a people become brigands at heart, though masquerading under the name of statesmen pleading the necessity of national expansion and kindred twaddle,-it is then that the world runs red with blood and roars with the flame of war. Is not this indeed one of the iron-toned discords of history-the spirit that prompts one race or nation to impose its methods of government upon another race or nation? Nor is the enormity of the crime lessened because its teachers, scientists, philosophers, and military vandals assert that it is all a part of the cosmic programme, the evolution of life upon this planet.

A second of the historic discords, as distinct from

and yet interwoven with the racial, is political. The bondman and the freeman, the slave and the master-what a long, bitter fight have they waged with each other! The battle, of course, is not over; it is one of the backlying factors in this world-war; but there is no doubt, I think, as to the ultimate outcome. The bondman must win his freedom, and in winning his freedom he will liberate his master, ofttimes the more abject slave of the two. Really, when one tries to think soberly of the fences separating the bond and the free, is it not almost incredible that they were not levelled, practically as well as theoretically, long ago? For upon what does this doctrine of bond and free rest? In the last analysis, it rests upon the assumption—the silly, thickheaded, colossal conceit-that one man is better than another man. Morally better? No! Intellectually better? No! He may be a composite— a moral leper and mental blunderbuss mercifully covered by one set of skin. But lo! because, forsooth, his dead ancestor disgraced a throne; or else he traces his family line back for seven generations instead of going back seventy times seven and viewing the dugout in which his forbears lived; or else his father left a fortune, dooming him to loll his way through life, cheating him out of all initiative and noble adventure-why upon these and other foundations as nonsensically flimsy, one man idiotically assumes that he is mysteriously better, wrought of a little finer clay than his brother man, who