s yet a _living
reality_ understand the nefarious consequences of _"co-operative-union_."
To protect themselves against this scheme of a perfidious neutrality,
they advocate an "_organic union_." This even is to the fore in the
Philadelphia plan of the "Inter-Church World Movement." "The plan of
federal union will have this result, that after it shall have been in
operation for a term of years, the importance of _divisive_ names and
creeds and methods will pass more and more into the dim background of the
past and acquire, even in the particular denomination itself, a merely
historical value, and the churches then will be ready for, and will
demand, a more complete union; so that what was the 'United Churches of
Christ in America' can become the 'United Church of Christ in America,'
and a real ecclesiastical power, holding and administering ecclesiastical
property and funds of such united church."

The promoters of "_organic union_" do not ignore the differences between
creeds, but they are trying to reduce them. This union strikes at the
very bed rock of Divine Revelation. For, the suppression of differences,
or their limitation to a certain doctrinal minimum, implies a compromise,
and a compromise, in matters of truth, is unacceptable. Truth is eternal
and therefore does not change. If the Westminister and Augsburg
Confessions were true yesterday, why should they not be also true to-day?
If the 39 Articles were the rule of Faith for the Anglican Church in the
past, why should they be to-day but "definitions of theological opinions
of the time of the Reformation," as Anglican Bishop Farthing, of
Montreal, recently stated.--"You change . . . therefore you are not
true," we may say, with Bossuet, to those Churches.

_In jure_.--This universal readiness to compromise should not astonish us
when we know that the very fundamental principle of the Reformation is
"_private judgment_" in matters of Faith. The divine message of
Revelation is to be interpreted as each one sees best. This principle
makes, "_de jure_," every Protestant independent in his religious belief,
and opens the door to the most conflicting interpretations of the Divine
Message. "The High Church clergyman to-day," writes A. Birrell, "is no
theologian, he is an opportunist." Dogma degenerates into religious
emotionalism. Doctrine becomes nothing but a "_scheme of theological
impressions_." To tolerate every doctrine is, for a Church, to teach
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