itan in New England; the temporary
alliance of Congregationalist and Presbyterian to avert the imposition
of a state hierarchy; the combination of Quaker and Roman Catholic to
defeat a project of religious oppression in Maryland; the drawing
together of Lutheran and Reformed Germans for common worship, under the
saintly influence of the Moravian Zinzendorf; and the "Plan of Union" by
which New Englander and Scotch-Irishman were to labor in common for the
evangelization of the new settlements.[406:1] These were sporadic
instances of a tendency that was by and by to become happily epidemic. A
more important instance of the same tendency was the organization of
societies for charitable work which should unite the gifts and personal
labors of the Christians of the whole continent. The chief period of
these organizations extended from 1810, the date of the beginning of the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, to 1826, when the
American Home Missionary Society was founded.[406:2] The "catholic
basis" on which they were established was dictated partly by the
conscious weakness of the several sects as they drew near to
undertakings formidable even to their united forces, and partly by the
glow of fraternal affection, and the sense of a common spiritual life
pervading the nation, with which the church had come forth from the
fervors of "the second awakening."[406:3] The societies, representing
the common faith and charity of the whole church as distinguished from
the peculiarities of the several sects, drew to themselves the affection
and devotion of Christian hearts to a degree which, to those who highly
valued these distinctions, seemed to endanger important interests. And,
indeed, the situation was anomalous, in which the sectarian divisions of
the Christian people were represented in the churches, and their
catholic unity in charitable societies. It would have seemed more
Pauline, not to say more Christian, to have had voluntary societies for
the sectarian work, and kept the churches for Christian communion. It is
no wonder that High-church champions, on one side and another, soon
began to shout to their adherents, "To your tents, O Israel!" Bishop
Hobart played not in vain upon his pastoral pipe to whistle back his
sheep from straying outside of his pinfold, exhorting them, "in their
endeavors for the general advancement of religion, to use only the
instrumentality of their own church."[407:1] And a jealousy