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400 years ago the writer John Donne said, ‘No man is an island… every one is a piece of the continent, … therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ The last two nights in Trafalgar Square, across the road from where I live, crowds gathered in wounded grief and wordless anger. They knew the bell that tolled in Paris, tolled for them. They realised an assault on liberty anywhere is a threat to liberty everywhere. Except France isn’t anywhere. It’s the place that invented liberty. Since the French Revolution in 1789 ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ has been a French national mission statement. These are the virtues France lives by. They don’t always sit alongside each other easily: you can tell the story of the last 200 years as a tussle between liberty and equality. When the Third Republic was called ‘a people with their heart on the left and their wallet on the right,’ it meant the French believed in theory in equality but in practice in liberty. The freedom to publish a satirical cartoon appears to be all about liberty. Hence we get the irony of hundreds of people gathering as a community to support the rights of the individual. But what is a satirical cartoon? A satirical cartoon says, ‘Just because you give yourself high-flown religious pretensions or threaten me with violence, you don’t get extra respect. Quite the contrary, the more you inflate your self-importance, the more you’re asking for your bubble to be burst.’ It’s actually a conviction about equality. In the grief and anger that follow this ruthless and bloodthirsty attack, liberty can be elevated to an article of faith – an unquestioned god, all of its own. But virtues aren’t like that. Virtues hunt in packs. Truthfulness requires love, and patience requires courage. Liberty and equality aren’t gods; they’re conditions for making an open and just society. But we’ve neglected the third word in this venerable motto: fraternity. We were created in myriad diversity and we grow up to be people of contrasting convictions and characters. ‘Fraternity’ is an old-fashioned word. But it names the challenge of our times: what happens when our identities and opinions take us to very different places? Fraternity is the reconciled diversity that Christians call the kingdom of God. Freedom of expression is wonderful and equality of status is foundational: but they’re both in the service of something more important, something glimpsed in the solidarity of strangers gathering to say, ‘Je suis Charlie.’ The issue isn’t straining to uphold liberty: it’s working out what to do with people who won’t. The real challenge isn’t how to live: it’s how to live together.