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Plan of Union by which New Englander and Scotch-Irishman were to labor in common for the evangelization of the new settlements.[406:1] These were sporadic instances of a tendency that was by and by to become happily epidemic. A more important instance of the same tendency was the organization of societies for charitable work which should unite the gifts and personal labors of the Christians of the whole continent. The chief period of these organizations extended from 1810, the date of the beginning of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, to 1826, when the American Home Missionary Society was founded.[406:2] The
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on which they were established was dictated partly by the conscious weakness of the several sects as they drew near to undertakings formidable even to their united forces, and partly by the glow of fraternal affection, and the sense of a common spiritual life pervading the nation, with which the church had come forth from the fervors of
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[406:3] The societies, representing the common faith and charity of the whole church as distinguished from the peculiarities of the several sects, drew to themselves the affection and devotion of Christian hearts to a degree which, to those who highly valued these distinctions, seemed to endanger important interests. And, indeed, the situation was anomalous, in which the sectarian divisions of the Christian people were represented in the churches, and their catholic unity in charitable societies. It would have seemed more Pauline, not to say more Christian, to have had voluntary societies for the sectarian work, and kept the churches for Christian communion. It is no wonder that High-church champions, on one side and another, soon began to shout to their adherents,
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To your tents, O Israel! Bishop Hobart played not in vain upon his pastoral pipe to whistle back his sheep from straying outside of his pinfold, exhorting them,
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[407:1] And a jealousy of the growing influence of a wide fellowship, in charitable labors, with Christians of other names, led to the enunciation of a like doctrine by High-church Presbyterians,[407:2] and contributed to the convulsive and passionate rending of the Presbyterian Church, in 1837, into nearly equal fragments. So effective has been the centrifugal force that of the extensive system of societies which from the year 1810 onward first organized works of national beneficence by enlisting the coöperation of
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societies, the sacred discontent of the Christian people with sectarian division continued to demand expression. How early the aspiration for an ecumenical council of evangelical Christendom became articulate, it may not be easy to discover[408:1] In the year 1846 the aspiration was in some measure realized in the first meeting of the Evangelical Alliance at London. No more mistakes were made in this meeting than perhaps were necessarily incident to a first experiment in untried work. Almost of course the good people began with the question, What good men shall we keep out? for it is a curious fact, in the long and interesting history of efforts after Christian union, that they commonly take the form of efforts so to combine many Christians as to exclude certain others. In this instance, beginning with the plan of including none but Protestant Christians, they proceeded at once to frame a platform that should bar out that
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thus making up,
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[409:1] But in spite of this and other like mistakes, or rather because of them (for it is through its mistakes that the church is to learn the right way), the early and unsuccessful beginnings of the Evangelical Alliance marked a stage in the slow progress toward a
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Charity Organization which has grown to be a necessity to the social life of cities and considerable towns, furnishing a central office of mutual correspondence and coördination to all churches and societies and persons engaged in the Christian work of relieving poverty and distress. This central bureau of charitable coöperation is not the less a center of catholic fellowship for the fact that it does not shut its door against societies not distinctively Christian, like Masonic fraternities, nor even against societies distinctively non-Christian, like Hebrew synagogues and