These two centuries have thus established beyond dispute the right of those two great historic forms of Christianity to the lasting reverence and gratitude of mankind.
Roman Catholicism has cherished the divine principle of unity. At great cost it has preserved unity. It has not been equally careful of the divine principle of liberty.
Protestantism has gloriously fought and suffered and died for liberty. It has never highly valued unity. It has even gloried in division. But unity is a diviner thing than even liberty. Liberty is precious only as the indispensable condition and pre-requisite of true unity.
It is a lovely and thrilling hope that the twentieth century may prove to be the century of the Great Christianity, the Christianity which will extinguish neither Latin nor Teutonic Christianity but comprehend and blend them, the simple, yet free and varied, democratic, passionate Christianity of all who love the Lord Jesus Christ and seek His Kingdom on the earth, the Christianity which was the first and will be the last.
This, at least, can be said, that the unparalleled problems of social and political reconstruction facing the world to-day can be rightly solved only by a great religious devotion, and it is difficult to see how that devotion can be secured except by a unification of the great Churches of Christendom and their common baptism into the spirit of primitive Christianity.
And let no one say the Great Christianity is only a beautiful dream.
Already, in that forever holy strip of land where towns were reduced to heaps of dust and trees to splintered trunks, where earth was gashed and torn as men never gashed and tore the kindly bosom of mother earth before, and where beautiful human bodies were mutilated and destroyed with a fury unknown in history, there the Great Christianity has disclosed itself. There at the mouth of hell unfolded the sweetest flowers that ever bloomed on earth. There in the brotherhood of the trenches became visible the Great Christianity. There Anglicans, Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Salvationists, and every other kind of Protestants, aye, and Roman Catholics, kneeled together to commemorate the suffering and love of their Common Redeemer, the Soldier-King.
"Father," wrote a Manitoba boy to his father from the trenches, in the spring of 1917, "we have a religion here but, father, it is not the same as yours. You don't like the Catholics or the Church of England, but, father, we love everybody here. We are all one. And, father," the boy went on, "when we come back, our religion is going to blow yours sky-high."
A prophecy not as yet fulfilled but not, perhaps, beyond fulfillment. Certain it is that our soldier boys will never crowd into our churches as they crowded to the colors till those churches are the home of a Christianity that has the breadth and the brotherliness and something, at least, of the heroism of the Christianity of the trenches.
But something more must be said about the Great Christianity.