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One I wrote her from Jerusalem in the year 1884. As I read the yellow, childish epistle I am stung with remorse that it is full of the narrow sectarianism that still held me in its grip. The other is dated Antrim, July, 1884, and is her answer to my sectarian appeal.
Thus in the atmosphere of this slowly dying sectarianism anybody who chooses to prophesy and prohibit can tyrannise over the people. If he chooses to say that drinking is always wrong, or that kissing is always wrong, or that wearing buttons is always wrong, people are afraid to contradict him for fear they should be contradicting their own great-grandchild.
Their thinkers were highly trained logicians; they revelled in abstract argument; theirs was a cold intellectual metaphysic, unwarmed by flesh and blood empiricism. Their narrow outlook on life, their religious zeal and their rationalist philosophy combined to produce in them sectarianism of an extreme type. Party spirit ran high among them.
And when I saw that Germans were so chained either by materialism or sectarianism, that instead of studying those my five German volumes and of acting accordingly they followed rather after their sectarian and materialistic leaders who have published all kinds of delusion against my books, and spoke also in a like manner publicly and privately against them, my directors moved me to tell to those who took more or less interest in the contents of my books and were skilful mechanics, that they should study Etzler's book, and if they would find his propositions practicable, they should try to awaken Germans with Etzler's machine to study my German volumes.
Luke Byles, who piqued himself on his reading, and was in the habit of asking casual acquaintances if they knew anything of Hobbes; 'it is right enough that the lower orders should be instructed. But this sectarianism within the Church ought to be put down. In point of fact, these Evangelicals are not Churchmen at all; they're no better than Presbyterians.
Unhappily, he let his people abandon their native tongue, while teaching them how to balance the rival parties in England, the latter a policy that has proved Ireland's fortune since. He loosed the spirit of sectarianism in the tithe war, and he crushed the Young Ireland movement, which bred Fenianism in its death agony. But he made the Catholic a citizen.
And if there were not hopes for the Future, which this hard, practical daily life does not suffice to teach us, the vision and the glory that belong to the Great Popular Creed, dimmed beneath the injustice, the follies, and the vices of the world as it is, would fade into the lukewarm sectarianism of temporary Party.
All sects and parties sought ascendency rather than the public good; angry and inexperienced, they refused to compromise. Sectarianism was the true hydra that baffled the energy of the courageous combatant. Parliaments were factious, meddlesome, and inexperienced, and sought to block the wheels of government rather than promote wholesome legislation.
What is said concerning the image of the beast applies to sectarianism as a whole and the human organization of all her so-called churches, regardless of the differences that exist between them as individual institutions; for they may differ as widely as the various systems of heathen religions symbolized by the dragon, yet they can be represented by the single symbol of an image to the first beast, because they are built upon the same general principles are but human organizations, falsely called churches of Christ, and are all contrary to the Scriptures.
They do not, as falsely charged, desire to distract or divide, or introduce sectarianism into the Public Schools; on the contrary, they wish to satisfy conscience by yielding to all others what they claim for themselves, and cannot help denouncing the present system as practically resulting in a form of sectarianism worse than any yet professed: to wit, "Indifferentism."
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