force in it; fellow-workers they are with God in the creation of the
family; they help him to get it to his mind, to perfect his father-idea.
Ever radiating peace, they welcome love, but do not seek it; they
provoke no jealousy. They are the children of God, for like him they
would be one with his creatures. His eldest son, his very likeness, was
the first of the family-peace-makers. Preaching peace to them that were
afar off and them that were nigh, he stood undefended in the turbulent
crowd of his fellows, and it was only over his dead body that his
brothers began to come together in the peace that will not be broken. He
rose again from the dead; his peace-making brothers, like himself, are
dying unto sin; and not yet have the evil children made their father
hate, or their elder brother flinch.

On the other hand, those whose influence is to divide and separate,
causing the hearts of men to lean away from each other, make themselves
the children of the evil one: born of God and not of the devil, they
turn from God, and adopt the devil their father. They set their God-born
life against God, against the whole creative, redemptive purpose of his
unifying will, ever obstructing the one prayer of the first-born--that
the children may be one with him in the Father. Against the heart-end of
creation, against that for which the Son yielded himself utterly, the
sowers of strife, the fomenters of discord, contend ceaseless. They do
their part with all the other powers of evil to make the world which the
love of God holds together--a world at least, though not yet a
family--one heaving mass of dissolution. But they labour in vain.
Through the mass and through it, that it may cohere, this way and that,
guided in dance inexplicable of prophetic harmony, move the children of
God, the lights of the world, the lovers of men, the fellow-workers with
God, the peace-makers--ever weaving, after a pattern devised by, and
known only to him who orders their ways, the web of the world's history.