need. The more I became interested in questions of social change,
the less I was concerned with questions of denominational welfare.
The more I became absorbed in the people of New York City, the
closer became my fellowship with other ministers similarly absorbed,
and the remoter my fellowship with those who were bound to me only
by the accident of the Unitarian tradition. More and more my hand
and heart went out directly to men who saw and labored for the
better day of which I dreamed; and only indirectly to those with
whom I was appointed to serve, but who could not or would not catch
the vision of my dreams. An irreconcilable conflict was here being
joined--the old, old conflict between a dead and a living
fellowship. It was my intuitive, although unconscious knowledge of
this fact, which made me a rebel in every Unitarian gathering of the
last ten years. It was a similarly unconscious instinct of
self-preservation which taught my Unitarian brethren, to whom the
old association was still central, to resent the things I sought. We
had been born together, and we lived together; our past and our
present were joint possessions. But when we faced the future, we
divided; my [12] colleagues, many of them, were content with old,
familiar ways, while I sought new associations.

What was dimly felt in those days, was suddenly transformed into
something clearly seen by the impact of the Great War. If this
stupendous conflict has revealed anything in religion, it is that
the sectarian divisions of Christendom are no longer to be
tolerated. In the fusing fires of battle, Presbyterian, Methodist,
Episcopalian, Unitarian, even Catholic, Protestant and Jew, have
been melted, and now flow in a single flaming stream into the mould
which shall fashion them into a single casting. Man after man has
returned from the front, to tell us that the denominational church