Page:Dr Stiggins, His Views and Principles.pdf/101

 a brave show in the useful Whittaker? If we are to be One (in this mechanical sense), hereafter, why do we not endeavour to be One now and on earth? I must say that the inconsistency is too apparent to escape remark.

The truth is, of course, that a merely mechanical unity is not recommended to us on earth, nor promised as a reward hereafter. Let us leave such unity as that to slaves and priests: Christianity is not a thing to be governed by the cast-iron rules of the mathematicians, and in the purely spiritual order in which Evangelical Christians move and have their being, two and two are constantly making five. In this spiritual sense, in the vital sense (the only one which really matters), all the Free Churches are already One, as the Enemy has found to his cost, as the polling booths testified not very long ago. As for the phrase, "our unhappy divisions," I repudiate it altogether. Our divisions are most happy; they are but another witness to the infinite Diversity in Unity which