I have chosen a subject both common and extremely difficult. Where is God leading us, in the matter of Church union? What is our next task, in the Church of Scotland? We older members remember two Church unions. I do not expect to see a third—unless it be with some of our own separated fragments in the Highlands, or with the United Free Church. May God grant these in His time. For the moment these hardly appear to be tasks. What can we do but pray for the Spirit of God to move both these Churches and ourselves, and live as ‘visible Christians’ alongside them?

There are more perplexing problems. We know that our unions of 1900 and 1929 have been part of something greater, a ‘movement’, a ‘vision’ (we say) of our era. But the next steps for ourselves, what are they to be? Our unions of 1900 and 1929 were ‘cheek by jowl’ re-unions. Those towards which we are now being drawn, are mostly strange to our people. I imagine everyone who has tried to prepare our people, in any way, for whatever ‘drawing closer’ may be God's will, has found that. The difficulty of ‘ecumenism’ is not just the name. It means other churches that are strangers to the vast majority of our folk. Societies aiming at Church union not infrequently find, that eager members of a few years back have left them, feeling that they were ‘getting nowhere’.