Author: John L. Stoddard

Publisher: Theclassics.Us

Published: 2013-09

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13: 9781230435107

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1826 edition. Excerpt: ...estate agent, who was "booming" a western town, issued a circular, in which the fact was mentioned, as an inducement to settle there, that in its population of six thousand there were seventeen different kinds of religion to choose from! That agent lacked a sensi of humour. A Methodist minister reported recently that he had discovered nine different Protestant sects in a town of Illinois, containing a population of only eight hundred souls! Another declared that in the same State he had found in seventeen families sixteen different forms of religious belief. ("Christian Unity," by the Rev. M. M. Sheedy, 1895, p. 50.) What wonder that a prominent Protestant American minister recently exclaimed: --"We have magnificent church machinery in this country; we have costly music and great Sunday-schools; and yet, within the last twenty-five years, the Churches of God in this land have averaged less than two conversions a year each!" (idem, p. 46). It is needless to say that the speaker of these words did not include among the "Churches of God" the Apostolic Church of Rome, but referred to Protestant organisations only. This statement is not surprising, when we consider the effect that must be produced by the sight of so many little struggling and frequently hostile denominations, all claiming to be Christians. Such a spectacle does not tend to make thoughtful people wish to join any of them. It affords perhaps a striking illustration of individual Christian "liberty," but does not correspond to the idea of the Church, founded and outlined by our Saviour. It is religious Individualism run mad. But if the quantity of these Protestant divisions is unedifying, still more so is the quality of some of them. For in their number one discovers those...