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The minister was a young missionary, zealously earnest, and lacking as yet the quality of hardness and doctrinal precision which had been the boy's daily bread and meat at the sectarian school. What wonder, then, that when the call for testimony was made, the old pounding and heart-hammering set in, and duty, duty, duty, wrote itself in flaming letters on the dingy walls?
The Saints now had great power at the polls, the same as in Missouri. The "Mormons" would not vote for men who would not give them their rights, and so many of these politicians became their enemies and stirred up the people against the Saints by their many lies. Then, there were the jealousies of the sectarian preachers; and perhaps worse than all, the evil work of apostates.
Whether this opinion had come to him from the diffused rationalism of his time, or was congenial to the practical and prosaic temperament which was disquieted by the waste of energy over futile sectarian squabbles, or was suggested by his early study of Seneca the only author of whom he speaks as having impressed him in early years it became a fixed conviction.
When I went to see them I sternly avoided those whom I met on the way, and looked askance at them like a real sectarian, and when I left the engineer's house I was ashamed of feeling so well-fed. But chiefly I was afraid of falling in love.
The Pilgrim Fathers went to America merely for their own freedom of religious worship: they were actually intolerant to others. From a sectarian patriotism developed what I have called "The Melting Pot," with its high universal mission, first at home and now over the world at large. The stages of growth are still more clearly marked in English history.
Lord George Bentinck, on the contrary, would impress on his friends, that if they wished to maintain the territorial constitution of their country, they must allow no sectarian considerations to narrow the basis of sympathy on which it should rest; and in the acres and millions of Ireland, in its soil and its people, equally neglected, he would have sought the natural auxiliaries of our institutions.
"It may be said that the old ecclesiastical system depended on a double bondage: first, the intellectual subjection of the masses through ignorance to their spiritual directors; and, secondly, the bondage of the directors themselves to the sectarian organizations, which as spiritual capitalists monopolized the opportunities of teaching.
Those engaged in this restoration movement heed the admonitions of Paul and Luther and call themselves "Christians," or "disciples of Christ," while they call the churches, "churches of Christ" or "churches of God." They do not use these names in a sectarian, but in a Scriptural, sense. They do not claim to be the "only Christians," but aim to be "Christians only."
The English and Scotch colonists drafted into Ulster by Elizabeth, James I, Cromwell, and William III, always evinced a tendency to become Irish in the second generation. The reason is plain. Devil-worship the cult of Fear was the territorial religion of Ireland; and, in this bitter fellowship, native Catholic and acclimatised Protestant sank their small sectarian differences.
They've borne all sorts of names, and my wife would tell you it's the difference between Christian and Pagan. I may be a pagan, but I don't like the name; it sounds sectarian. She thinks me at any rate no better than an ancient Greek. It's the difference between making the most of life and making the least, so that you'll get another better one in some other time and place.
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