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"Schisms" are not peculiar to the Church of the present day, nor are they "the result of Protestantism," as some allege, unless Protestantism is understood to represent that doctrine which is termed "the right of private judgment," but which might be described rather as the absolute necessity for each man to believe the truth for himself, and not to be satisfied that another man should see and believe it for him.
The growth of the Christian Church, old sects and schisms, the Councils, affairs of Papal policy these things had a very genuine interest for her; circumstances favouring, she might have become an erudite woman; But the conditions were so far from favourable that all she succeeded in doing was to undermine her health.
But we are not going to spend our time to-night in discussing sects, or deploring their divisions, although we cannot altogether refrain regret when we contemplate the seamless robe of Christ rent into more than twain, and dabbled in blood worse than Joseph's coat was when his father said, "Some evil beast hath devoured him"; and although it does seem to us sometimes, as we contemplate the havoc of schisms and strife of sects, as if some convulsion from beneath had shaken down the towers of the New Jerusalem, and streams from the nether fires had coursed down the channels of the river of life.
Poor, badly equipped, rent by family feuds and clan schisms, his followers were no match for the French troops; and after the utter break-up of his forces Paoli fled to England, taking with him three hundred and forty of the most determined patriots.
Perhaps he had been born and bred among serious dissenters, seeing salvation in Jesus only and abhorring the vain pomps of the establishment. Had he felt the need of an implicit faith amid the welter of sectarianism and the jargon of its turbulent schisms, six principle men, peculiar people, seed and snake baptists, supralapsarian dogmatists?
Further, it was seen that schisms do not originate in a love of truth, which is a source of courtesy and gentleness, but rather in an inordinate desire for supremacy.
On February 1, 1656, a stringent "Ordinance against Conventicles" was posted, which ran: "Some unqualified persons in such meetings assume the ministerial office, the expounding and explanation of the holy Word of God, without being called or appointed thereto by ecclesiastical or civil authority, which is in direct contravention and opposition to the general Civil and Ecclesiastical order of our Fatherland, besides that many dangerous heresies and schisms are to be apprehended.
For the reason of the reservation was, because some reverend divines who dealt and laboured in the reformation of those churches, perceiving the occurring lets and oppositions which were caused by most dangerous schisms and seditions, and by the raging of bloody wars, scarcely expected to effectuate so much as the purging of the church from fundamental errors and gross idolatry, which wrought them to be content, that lesser abuses in discipline and church policy should be then tolerated, because they saw not how to overtake them all at that time.
Wars and schisms may part our bodies, but stronger ties unite our souls. Through Silas Whipple, through his mother, Virginia knew that she was woven of one piece with Stephen Brice. In a thousand ways she was reminded, lest she drive it from her belief. She might marry another, and that would not matter. She sank again into his chair, and gave herself over to the thoughts crowding in her heart.
In Germany, the schisms in the church produced also a lasting political schism, which made that country for more than a century the theatre of confusion, but at the same time threw up a firm barrier against political oppression.
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