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This is the tragedy of it all; that Protestants and Anglicans and Roman Catholics are, so far as the majority are concerned, honestly convinced that they are right in maintaining their own divisiveness; in perpetuating an hundred Protestant sects on the basis of some variation in the form of baptism or church government or the method of conversion; in splitting up the Catholic Church because of a thousand year old disagreement as to a clause in the Creed which has a technical and theological significance only, or because one sector is alleged to have added unjustifiably to the Faith while the other is alleged to have unjustifiably taken away.
No greater mistake was ever made than this of trying to uphold and promulgate the meekness, the humility, the love, and the fellowship of Christ by means of the haughty pride, the cruel hate, and the bitter divisiveness of caste. Protestant Christianity is to-day the pronounced foe of caste.
For instance, in this very Epistle he invokes 'the God of patience and of comfort' to grant to the Roman Christians 'to be of the same mind with one another according to Christ Jesus, and to the Corinthians, who had their full share of Greek divisiveness, he writes, 'Be of the same mind, live in peace, and assures them that, if so, 'the God of love and peace will be with them'; to his beloved Philippians he pours out his heart in beseeching them by 'the consolation that is in Christ Jesus, and the comfort of love, and the fellowship of the Spirit that they would 'fulfil his joy, that they be of the same mind, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind'; whilst to the two women in that Church who were at variance with one another he sends the earnest exhortation 'to be of the same mind in the Lord, and prays one whom we only know by his loving designation of 'a true yokefellow, to help them in what would apparently put a strain upon their Christian principle.
For Congress, too, has changed in our time. There has grown a certain divisiveness. We have seen the hard looks and heard the statements in which not each other's ideas are challenged, but each other's motives. And our great parties have too often been far apart and untrusting of each other. It has been this way since Vietnam. That war cleaves us still.
We all know, however, that the fraternal regard, sympathy, and confidence is far removed from the sad divisiveness of the past, that it is pregnant with blessing in the coming of the Kingdom of God, and that it is far in advance of the spirit of union which prevails in England or America. In this we believe that the East is to open the way for the West.
The high point in divisiveness was the decision of the United States spokesmen to inaugurate the American Century by establishing control over the Pacific Ocean, making itself the chief power in Asia and installing U.S.A. authority in the power vacuum left by the expulsion of Britain, France, Holland and Japan from the territories composing their former empires.
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