But the widest missionary spirit is inclusive. It is not a substitute for home work, any more than public life is a substitute for family life. The former is the extension of the latter. The disciples of the first days reached the uttermost part of the earth through Jerusalem and all Judæa and Samaria; while the disciples of these latter days must touch the bounds of the world through the parish, the diocese, the Church of the nation. Nothing, no matter how fine and striking it may be, can take the place of loyalty to the duties that are nearest at hand. Church life may be conceived of as a series of concentric circles, the innermost of which representing parochial relations, the next diocesan missions, then domestic, and the outermost circle foreign missions. Power to traverse the large circumference comes from faithfully treading the round of those that lie within, beginning with that next the centre. The only way to have power and to serve abroad is to live a deep full life at home, and, let it be added, the only way to have large power and to serve at home is to cast the eye far abroad and wind the interests of a whole world around the heart. And the spiritual force of the foreign mission field is no lying index of the spiritual condition of the home Church; it tells the tale as truly as the pulse reports for the heart. It may be perfectly true of every other society of men that mere concentration is the secret of power, but it is not so with the Church. Any ecclesiastical unit, be it parish, diocese, province, or national Church, which is content to feed itself on rich spiritual food, without regard for the rest of the world, will sooner or later be filled with disease and die. However specious a form self-contemplation may assume, it inevitably ends in ruin, for it leads to isolation; and what is isolation but the most awful and irretrievable of catastrophes? The only true independence is that which is the fruit of interdependence. A given Church may have all the appearance of life--there may be popularity, large property, handsome equipment and other signs of outward prosperity--but within there is nothing but death. It is just as wrong and just as fatal to hold aloof, on any plea soever, from the common life of the entire Church at home and abroad, as it is to cut ourselves off from the Church of the past by a denial of fundamental truth. The former, quite as much as the latter, is a departure from Apostolic Christianity, and so merits the opprobrious name of schism.