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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 October 2024
When I agreed to speak this afternoon I thought it would be more useful if I spoke to you personally and informally, rather than if I attempted to give a set lecture on so vast a subject. Besides, I would like to begin by making my own standpoint clear, and I can do that more easily if you will let me be personal.
I have great sympathy and great respect for many of those who are working towards reunion. But I have never classed myself among them, partly this is because ‘reunion’ has never seemed to me an immediate and practical problem. Perhaps because, all my life, so many of my closest friends have belonged to different communions and religions from my own, I can realise what a gulf still remains of mutual misapprehension, and how unlikely it is that that will be done away with within a space of time measurable by the historian. And then I have always consciously avoided the use of the term ‘reunion’ since it has seemed to me ambiguous in modern English. Possibly I am here influenced by the fact that, when I was a young man, ‘reunion’ was commonly used in England in the sense of ‘reunion of the Church’, and that as a phrase is incompatible with either the Catholic or the Orthodox conception of the Church’s indivisibility. But the need of mutual charity will always be an immediate and practical problem. All through history in every religion and in.every Christian communion there have been members who have been infected by the spirit of religious intolerance. That spirit of intolerance has been always a father of lies leading to calumnies of individuals and to distorted travesties of the doctrines of others. It has had its roots deep down in the spirit of hatred and has flowered in season into acts of gross physical cruelty.