If only we had all more clearly before us that vision, we could not but be filled not merely with burning shame at our own failure, but with longing to be more helpful to our fellows, and to draw nearer to them, as we would grow nearer to our spirit. And this desire within us will surely be strengthened as we turn towards that wonderful reflection of His teaching gathered together for us in the closing chapters of the Gospel of John. In that unique picture of the mind and heart of the Master there are traits over which we some- times pause and wonder; sayings which, when we can free our eyes from the scales with which custom has covered them, seem to shine with a light brighter than we can bear. And in that chapter, in which we listen as silent witnesses to the great charter of futurity, the prayer of the Founder for His Church that is to be, there are words which are so full of lofty purpose that we hesitate to apply them to our lives; unconsciously, perhaps, we have been wont to read them over and treat them as metaphor, meant to inspire but not to be realized; and gradually we have lost hold of their true significance, the inner life of thought beyond them. How truly can we say that we have realized, as individuals or as a Church, this picture which that prayer gives us of the Master's aim and desire for us? [p.24]
"And I am no more in the world, and these are in the world, and I come to Thee. Holy Father, keep them in Thy name which Thou hast given me, /that they may be one, even as we are/. . . . Neither for these only do I pray, but for them also that believe on Me through their word; /that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee,/ that they also may be one in us: /that the/ /world may believe that Thou didst send Me/."
So lofty is the thought that one may wonder whether, if these words had not come down to us as they have done, and some later Christian mystic had dared to utter this as his ideal, he would not have been treated as a madman or a heretic. It is hard to think of what it means: a unity of Christians one with another, even as there is unity between the Divine Father and the unique Son.
In the bygone days of scholastic theology men might have gone on to unfold the meaning of this by showing how unity of substance did not remove the difference of person; But these thoughts do not live for us to-day as for our forefathers. We must seek to find the meaning of Christ's union with the Father, not by the road of medieval metaphysics, but by some method which may appeal to our moral consciousness.