[Sidenote:  Not church federation]

Nor will an organic union of all the sects solve the problem of unity.  In the first place, the tendency of such a union is toward imperialism, the creation on the federation plan of another world-church.  In the second place, such a federation would strengthen rather than lessen the authority of human rule, while the compromises necessary to make such a project possible would lessen in the same degree that freedom of the Spirit by which alone the full gospel can be given to the world.  And in the third place, such a federation would not be the church of God, for the very framework on which it would rest, human ecclesiasticism, is foreign to the original conception of the church.  It would be only a human arrangement patterned after the model of a world-empire.  And for another reason such would not be the church.  The divine ekklesia includes in its membership the whole family of God.  Thousands of men and women who are united to Christ and in fellowship with all the saved are not members of the formally organized sects.  Therefore the union of all such churches in one federation would not include the whole family.

[Sidenote:  Back to the Bible standard]

Thus, the remedy for sects is not church federation, nor a return to the historic creeds, nor the adoption of one of the exclusive forms of church polity; neither is it an attempt to hide the sin of the obnoxious sect system by covering it with a mantle of charity and patience—­as a sort of necessary evil.  What, then, is the real remedy for sects?  It is the absolute rejection of every foreign element that has crept into the Christian system and the return to that primitive conception of the church as made up of the entire brotherhood of Christ, organized and controlled by the Holy Spirit.  For true unity we must turn from hierarchies and apostolical successions and priestly corporations and church synods and human creeds to THE CHRIST who alone is the head of the church.

[Sidenote:  True membership]

Such a movement requires a moral revolution with respect to the attitude of God’s people toward membership in sects.  It requires the obliteration of sect lines and the recognition of no other bond of union than that of a common brotherhood through union with Christ.  Divine life secured through repentance and faith is the sole condition of membership in the church of Christ, and this relationship is maintained by obedience to the commands of Christ and consistent Christian conduct.  “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).

[Sidenote:  Elimination of ecclesiasticism]