of the
growing influence of a wide fellowship, in charitable labors, with
Christians of other names, led to the enunciation of a like doctrine by
High-church Presbyterians,[407:2] and contributed to the convulsive and
passionate rending of the Presbyterian Church, in 1837, into nearly
equal fragments. So effective has been the centrifugal force that of
the extensive system of societies which from the year 1810 onward first
organized works of national beneficence by enlisting the cooeperation of
"all evangelical Christians," the American Bible Society alone continues
to represent any general and important combination from among the
different denominations.

For all the waning of interest in the "catholic basis" societies, the
sacred discontent of the Christian people with sectarian division
continued to demand expression. How early the aspiration for an
ecumenical council of evangelical Christendom became articulate, it may
not be easy to discover[408:1] In the year 1846 the aspiration was in
some measure realized in the first meeting of the Evangelical Alliance
at London. No more mistakes were made in this meeting than perhaps were
necessarily incident to a first experiment in untried work. Almost of
course the good people began with the question, What good men shall we
keep out? for it is a curious fact, in the long and interesting history
of efforts after Christian union, that they commonly take the form of
efforts so to combine many Christians as to exclude certain others. In
this instance, beginning with the plan of including none but Protestant
Christians, they proceeded at once to frame a platform that should bar
out that "great number of the best and holiest men in England who are
found among the Quakers," thus making up, "designedly and with their
eyes open, a schismatic unity--a unity composed of one part of God's
elect, to the exclusion of another; and this in a grand effort after the
very unity of the body of Christ."[409:1] But in spite of this and other
like mistakes, or rather because of them (for it is through its mistakes
that the church is to learn the right way), the early and unsuccessful
beginnings of the Evangelical Alliance marked a stage in the slow
progress toward a "manifestation of the sons of God" by their love
toward each other and toward the common Lord.

It is in large part the eager appetency for some manifestation of
interconfessional fellowship that has hastened the acceptance of such