The great majority of those for whom Christianity is yet a living reality understand the nefarious consequences of "co-operative-union.”  To protect themselves against this scheme of a perfidious neutrality, they advocate an “organic union.”  This even is to the fore in the Philadelphia plan of the “Inter-Church World Movement.”  “The plan of federal union will have this result, that after it shall have been in operation for a term of years, the importance of divisive names and creeds and methods will pass more and more into the dim background of the past and acquire, even in the particular denomination itself, a merely historical value, and the churches then will be ready for, and will demand, a more complete union; so that what was the ’United Churches of Christ in America’ can become the ‘United Church of Christ in America,’ and a real ecclesiastical power, holding and administering ecclesiastical property and funds of such united church.”

The promoters of “organic union” do not ignore the differences between creeds, but they are trying to reduce them.  This union strikes at the very bed rock of Divine Revelation.  For, the suppression of differences, or their limitation to a certain doctrinal minimum, implies a compromise, and a compromise, in matters of truth, is unacceptable.  Truth is eternal and therefore does not change.  If the Westminister and Augsburg Confessions were true yesterday, why should they not be also true to-day?  If the 39 Articles were the rule of Faith for the Anglican Church in the past, why should they be to-day but “definitions of theological opinions of the time of the Reformation,” as Anglican Bishop Farthing, of Montreal, recently stated.—­“You change . . . therefore you are not true,” we may say, with Bossuet, to those Churches.

In jure.—­This universal readiness to compromise should not astonish us when we know that the very fundamental principle of the Reformation is “private judgment” in matters of Faith.  The divine message of Revelation is to be interpreted as each one sees best.  This principle makes, “de jure,” every Protestant independent in his religious belief, and opens the door to the most conflicting interpretations of the Divine Message.  “The High Church clergyman to-day,” writes A. Birrell, “is no theologian, he is an opportunist.”  Dogma degenerates into religious emotionalism.  Doctrine becomes nothing but a “scheme of theological impressions.”  To tolerate every doctrine is, for a Church, to teach none.  Doctrinal chaos, such as we now see outside of the Catholic Church, is the inevitable result of compromise.  Winston Churchill’s famous novel, “Inside of the Cup,” is nothing but the diagnosis of this disintegration which Protestant Churches are now witnessing.

The history of Protestantism is but the history of its changes of religious belief.  For “between authority and impressionism in matters of Revelation, there is no alternative.”  As Christianity is not the product of the human mind, but a Revelation from God, authority,—­a divinely constituted infallible and living authority—­is a necessity, and the only possible bond of unity.