We have seen how titanic the labour
is; impatience will help nothing; here if anywhere is needed the love
that is patient, and ready for the travail of waiting and praying.
The cry of generous souls of course is "Something must be _done_." Of
course it must; but let anybody consider what sheer miracles of changed
convictions on Unity have been "done" within ten, and even five years.
Better than any such immediate action which would certainly cause
division, is the enlarging of the scope and sphere of this miracle, so
that the friendly conditions of France are naturally reproduced in
England.
With these precautions, then, let us see what can be done with universal
consent.
(_a_) The first thing is to turn the intellectual opinion that Christian
division is wrong, and unity necessary, into a general passion. That is
to say, we want to develop among us the _motive of love_. We all talk
about love glibly, and about brotherhood and a new world, with very
little sense of what these terms involve in the individual life. I am
sure that we hardly know yet what love means nor what it exacts, nor
guess into how many provinces of ordinary life it can and ought to
operate; how many heritages of past history it must be allowed to wipe
out, how many preconceived notions it must dissipate; into how many
social, commercial, municipal, political relations it must begin to
permeate.
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