of Heaven.  Some Christians work all the better in harness that suits their peculiar tastes and preferences.  Denominationalism becomes an evil the moment it degenerates into bitter and bigoted sectarianism.  Conflicts between a dozen regiments is suicide to an army.  When a dozen denominations strive to maintain their own feeble churches in a community that requires only three or four churches, then sectarianism becomes an unspeakable nuisance.

I could cite many instances to prove the great progress that has been made in church fellowship.  For example, my early ministry was in a town in which the Society of Friends had a large meeting house, well filled by a most intelligent, orthodox and devout congregation.  But its members never entered any other house of worship.  I had the warmest personal intimacy with some of its leading men, but they would say:  “We would like to hear thee preach on First Day, but the rules of our society forbid it.”  I have lived to see the day when I am invited to speak in Friends’ meetings, and I have rejoiced to invite Quaker brothers, and sisters also, to speak in my pulpit.  When I visit London, the most eminent living Quaker, J. Bevan Braithwaite, welcomes me to his hospitable house, and we join in prayer together.  I wish that the exemplary and useful Society of Friends were more multiplied on both sides of the sea.

During the early half of the last century sectarian controversies ran high, especially in the newly settled West.  It was a common custom to hold public discussions in school houses and frontier meeting houses, where controverted topics between denominations were presented by chosen champions before applauding audiences.  Ministers fired hot shot at one another’s pulpits; churches were often as militant as mendicant, and all those polemics were excused as contending most earnestly for the faith.  Both sides found their ammunition in the same Bible.  When I was a student in the Princeton Seminary, a classmate from Kentucky gave me a little hymn-book used at the camp meetings in the frontier settlements of his native region.  In that book was a hymn, one verse of which contains these sweet and irenic lines: 

   “When I was blind, and could not see,
   The Calvinists deceived me.”

Just imagine the incense of devout praise ascending heavenward in such a thick smoke of sectarian contentions!  All the denominations were more or less afflicted with this controversial malady; and I will venture to say that in Kentucky and Ohio and other new regions, the Presbyterians were often a fair match for their Methodist neighbors in these theological pugilistics.  I might multiply illustrations of these unhappy clashings and controversies that have often disfigured even the most evangelical branches of Christendom.  What a blessed change for the better have I witnessed in my old days!  Among the foremost efforts of denominational fellowship was the organization of the American Bible