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Almost all the promoters of this union movement have themselves found their way out of sectarianism after heart-rending efforts to rid themselves from their hereditary prejudices and errors. They are simply entreating others to do what they themselves have done, for the sake of Christ's cause, and help to establish local churches of Christ after the Apostolic model.
Thus the freedom of the Reformation was turned into the curse of division and sectarianism. Divided Protestantism is better than the religious tyranny of the Dark Ages; but it is bad, and will be replaced with the Christian union of the New Testament when loyalty to Christ and his Word is substituted for loyalty to human leaders and their opinions embodied in creeds.
The multiplicity and increasing facilities in the means of transportation and travel; the State visit of energetic and enlightened reformers to Persia’s capital; the forthcoming and widely-advertised journey of the Sháh himself to the progressive capitals of Western Europe; the repercussion of Turkey’s astounding reforms among an essentially sensitive and receptive people; the loud and persistent clamor of a revolting order in Russia against the evil domination and dark plottings of all forms of religious sectarianism; the relentless vigor with which Afghanistan’s ambitious Ruler, reinforced by the example of his gracious Consort, is pursuing his campaign of repression against a similar order of a corrupted clergy at home—all tend to lend their force in fostering and fashioning that public opinion which can alone provide an enduring basis for the reform Movement destined to usher in that golden Era craved for by the followers of the Faith in Bahá’u’lláh’s native land.
The Assembly, we have shown, besides still carrying on within itself the main question between Presbyterianism and Congregationalism, had begun a wider war against Schism, Sectarianism, the whole miscellany of English heresies, and especially the all-including heresy of Toleration.
If he says to the schoolmaster, I do not wish you to make my son an Episcopalian, a Baptist, a Presbyterian, or a Methodist, very well. That is not the schoolmaster's business. He was not hired to teach sectarianism.
But the real fact was that the system itself tended to convert good men and women into tyrants. The special manifestation of evil was both effect and cause. It was the natural tendency of the system to make tyrants, and tyrants perpetuated the system. So also with sectarianism.
I never had the young man's period of disbelief. There has never been a time when if the Angel of Death had appeared upon the scene no matter how festal I would not have knelt with adoration and welcome; never a time on the battlefield or at sea when if the elements had opened to swallow me I would not have gone down shouting! Sectarianism in time yielded to universalism.
The work has but fairly begun, and the field is just beginning to ripen for the larger harvest. Sectarianism is still present in all of its hideousness, but the people are beginning to see the desolation and sinfulness of divisions and are groping in the dark in various efforts at solution.
To conclude this particular, if the settlement of religion, made in 1690, had revived and ratified the authority of our reforming parliaments, and laws made by them; then, as these obliged the king to swear the covenants before his coronation, and all ranks to swear them, and obliged to root out malignancy, sectarianism, &c., and to promote uniformity in doctrine, worship, discipline and government, in the three nations, so the revolution settlement would have obliged all to the practice of the same duties, and that, before ever king, or any under him, could have been admitted to any trust; while all that would not comply therewith, would have been held as enemies, not only to religion, but to their king and country also, as was the case when reformation flourished.
There is another reason why men's minds are impelled away from the purely sentimental moral doctrines insisted upon by sectarianism, which is ecclesiasticism run riot, and the higher the education the deeper we delve into the secret motives of that class of mankind, the deceptive outward appearances of which dominate the pages of history, which is, that the greatest and most glorious systems of government, the wisest and most powerful of rulers, the greatest and most liberal statesmen, heroes, and conspicuous conquerors, originated in violations of the Decalogue, and those nations and kingdoms which have been founded upon strictly ecclesiastical ideas, have all sunk beneath the shifting sands of time, or have become so degenerate as to be bywords and objects of derision.
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