their way home, are peace-makers in the travelling company; for, surely,
those in any family are specially the children, who make peace with and
among the rest. The true idea of the universe is the whole family in
heaven and earth. All the children in this part of it, the earth, at
least, are not good children; but however far, therefore, the earth is
from being a true portion of a real family, the life-germ at the root of
the world, that by and for which it exists, is its relation to God the
father of men. For the development of this germ in the consciousness of
the children, the church--whose idea is the purer family within the more
mixed, ever growing as leaven within the meal by absorption, but which
itself is, alas! not easily distinguishable from the world it would
change--is one of the passing means. For the same purpose, the whole
divine family is made up of numberless human families, that in these,
men may learn and begin to love one another. God, then, would make of
the world a true, divine family. Now the primary necessity to the very
existence of a family is peace. Many a human family is no family, and
the world is no family yet, for the lack of peace. Wherever peace is
growing, there of course is the live peace, counteracting disruption and
disintegration, and helping the development of the true essential
family. The one question, therefore, as to any family is, whether peace
or strife be on the increase in it; for peace alone makes it possible
for the binding grass-roots of life--love, namely, and justice--to
spread throughout what were else but a wind-blown heap of still drifting
sand. The peace-makers quiet the winds of the world ever ready to be up
and blowing; they tend and cherish the interlacing roots of the
ministering grass; they spin and twist many uniting cords, and they
weave many supporting bands; they are the servants, for the truth's
sake, of the individual, of the family, of the world, of the great
universal family of heaven and earth. They are the true children of that
family, the allies and ministers of every clasping and consolidating