A History of American Christianity

by Leonard Woolsey Bacon

Meanwhile the signs of a craving for larger fellowship continue to be multiplied. Quite independently of practical results achieved, the mere fact of efforts and experiments is a hopeful fact, even when these are made in directions in which the past experience of the church has written up "No Thoroughfare."

I. No one need question the sincerity or the fraternal spirit with which some important denominations have each proposed the reuniting of Christians on the simple condition that all others should accept the distinctive tenet for which each of these denominations has contended against others. The present pope, holding the personal respect and confidence of the Christian world to a higher degree than any one of his predecessors since the Reformation (to name no earlier date), has earnestly besought the return of all believers to a common fellowship by their acceptance of the authority and supremacy of the Roman see. With equal cordiality the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church have signified their longing for restored fellowship with their brethren on the acceptance by these of prelatical episcopacy. And the Baptists, whose constant readiness at fraternization in everything else is emphasized by their conscientious refraining from the sacramental sign of communion, are not less earnest in their desire for the unification of Christendom by the general acceptance of that tenet concerning baptism, the widespread rejection of which debars them, reluctant, from unrestricted fellowship with the general company of faithful men. But while we welcome every such manifestation of a longing for union among Christians, and honor the aspiration that it might be brought about in one or another of these ways, in forecasting the probabilities of the case, we recognize the extreme unlikeliness that the very formulas which for ages have been the occasions of mutual contention and separation shall become the basis of general agreement and lasting concord.

II. Another indication of the craving for a larger fellowship is found in the efforts made for large sectarian councils, representing closely kindred denominations in more than one country. The imposing ubiquity of the Roman Church, so impressively sustaining its claim to the title Catholic, may have had some influence to provoke other denominations to show what could be done in emulation of this sort of greatness. It were wiser not to invite comparison at this point. No other Christian organization, or close fellowship of organizations, can approach that which has its seat at Rome, in the world-wideness of its presence, or demand with so bold a challenge,

Quæ regio in terris non nostri plena laboris?

The representative assembly of any other body of Christians, however widely ramified, must seem insignificant when contrasted with the real ecumenicity of the Vatican Council. But it has not been useless for the larger sects of Protestantism to arrange their international assemblies, if it were for nothing more than this, that such widening of the circle of practical fellowship may have the effect to disclose to each sect a larger Christendom outside to which their fellowship must sooner or later be made to reach.

The first of these international sectarian councils was that commonly spoken of as "the Pan-Anglican Synod," of Protestant Episcopal bishops gathered at Lambeth by invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1867 and thrice since. The example was bettered by the Presbyterians, who in 1876 organized for permanence their "Pam-Presbyterian Alliance," or "Alliance of the Reformed Churches throughout the world holding the Presbyterian System." The first of the triennial general councils of this Alliance was held at Edinburgh in 1877, "representing more than forty-nine separate churches scattered through twenty-five different countries, and consisting of more than twenty thousand congregations."[413:1] The second council was held at Philadelphia, and the third at Belfast. The idea was promptly seized by the Methodists. At the instance of the General Conference of the United States, a Pam-Methodist Council was held in London in 1881,—"the first Ecumenical Methodist Conference,"—consisting of four hundred delegates, representing twenty-eight branches of Methodism, ten in the eastern hemisphere and eighteen in the western, including six millions of communicants and about twenty millions of people.[413:2] Ten years later, in 1891, a second "Methodist Ecumenical Conference" was held at Washington.

Interesting and useful as this international organization of sects is capable of being made, it would be a mistake to look upon it as marking a stage in the progress toward a manifest general unity of the church. The tendency of it is, on the whole, in the opposite direction.

III. If the organization of "ecumenical" sects has little tendency toward the visible communion of saints in the American church, not much more is to be hoped from measures for the partial consolidation of sects, such as are often projected and sometimes realized. The healing of the great thirty years' schism of the Presbyterian Church, in 1869, was so vast a gain in ecclesiastical economy, and in the abatement of a long-reeking public scandal and of a multitude of local frictions and irritations, that none need wonder at the awakening of ardent desires that the ten Presbyterian bodies still surviving might "find room for all within one fold"[413:3] in a national or continental Presbyterian Church. The seventeen Methodist bodies, separated by no differences of polity or of doctrine that seem important to anybody but themselves, if consolidated into one, would constitute a truly imposing body, numbering nearly five millions of communicants and more than fifteen millions of people; and if this should absorb the Protestant Episcopal Church (an event the possibility of which has often been contemplated with complacency), with its half-million of communicants and its elements of influence far beyond the proportion of its numbers, the result would be an approximation to some good men's ideal of a national church, with its army of ministers coördinated by a college of bishops, and its plebs adunata sacerdoti. Consultations are even now in progress looking toward the closer fellowship of the Congregationalists and the Disciples. The easy and elastic terms of internal association in each of these denominations make it the less difficult to adjust terms of mutual coöperation and union. Suppose that the various Baptist organizations were to discover that under their like congregational government there were ways in which, without compromising or weakening in the slightest their protest against practices which they reprobate in the matter of baptism, they could, for certain defined purposes, enter into the same combination, the result would be a body of nearly five millions of communicants, not the less strong for being lightly harnessed and for comprehending wide diversities of opinion and temperament. In all this we have supposed to be realized nothing more than friends of Christian union have at one time or another urged as practicable and desirable. By these few and, it would seem, not incongruous combinations there would be four powerful ecclesiastical corporations,—one Catholic and three Protestant,—which, out of the twenty millions of church communicants in the United States, would include more than seventeen and one half millions.[415:1]

The pondering of these possibilities is pertinent to this closing chapter on account of the fact that, as we near the end of the nineteenth century, one of the most distinctly visible tendencies is the tendency toward the abatement of sectarian division in the church. It is not for us simply to note the converging lines of tendency, without some attempt to compute the point toward which they converge. There is grave reason to doubt whether this line of the consolidation or confederation of sects, followed never so far, would reach the desired result.

If the one hundred and forty-three sects enumerated in the eleventh census of the United States[415:2] should by successful negotiation be reduced to four, distinguished each from the others by strongly marked diversities of organization and of theological statement, and united to each other only by community of the one faith in Jesus Christ, doubtless it would involve some important gains. It would make it possible to be rid of the friction and sometimes the clash of much useless and expensive machinery, and to extinguish many local schisms that had been engendered by the zeal of some central sectarian propaganda. Would it tend to mitigate the intensity of sectarian competition, or would it tend rather to aggravate it? Is one's pride in his sect, his zeal for the propagation of it, his jealousy of any influence that tends to impair its greatness or hinder its progress, likely to be reduced, or is it rather likely to be exalted, by the consciousness that the sect is a very great sect, standing alone for important principles? Whatever there is at present of asperity in the emulous labors of the competing denominations, would it not be manifold exasperated if the competition were restricted to four great corporations or confederations? If the intestine conflict of the church of Christ in America should even be narrowed down (as many have devoutly wished) to two contestants,—the Catholic Church with its diversity of orders and rites, on the one hand, and Protestantism with its various denominations solidly confederated, on the other,—should we be nearer to the longed-for achievement of Christian union? or should we find sectarian animosities thereby raised to the highest power, and the church, discovering that it was on the wrong track for the desired terminus, compelled to reverse and back in order to be switched upon the right one?