asures for the partial consolidation of
sects, such as are often projected and sometimes realized. The healing
of the great thirty years' schism of the Presbyterian Church, in 1869,
was so vast a gain in ecclesiastical economy, and in the abatement of a
long-reeking public scandal and of a multitude of local frictions and
irritations, that none need wonder at the awakening of ardent desires
that the ten Presbyterian bodies still surviving might "find room for
all within one fold"[413:3] in a national or continental Presbyterian
Church. The seventeen Methodist bodies, separated by no differences of
polity or of doctrine that seem important to anybody but themselves, if
consolidated into one, would constitute a truly imposing body, numbering
nearly five millions of communicants and more than fifteen millions of
people; and if this should absorb the Protestant Episcopal Church (an
event the possibility of which has often been contemplated with
complacency), with its half-million of communicants and its elements of
influence far beyond the proportion of its numbers, the result would be
an approximation to some good men's ideal of a national church, with its
army of ministers cooerdinated by a college of bishops, and its _plebs
adunata sacerdoti_. Consultations are even now in progress looking
toward the closer fellowship of the Congregationalists and the
Disciples. The easy and elastic terms of internal association in each of
these denominations make it the less difficult to adjust terms of mutual
cooeperation and union. Suppose that the various Baptist organizations
were to discover that under their like congregational government there
were ways in which, without compromising or weakening in the slightest
their protest against practices which they reprobate in the matter of
baptism, they could, for certain defined purposes, enter into the same
combination, the result would be a body of nearly five millions of
communicants, not the less strong for being lightly harnessed and for
comprehending wide diversities of opinion and temperament. In all this
we have supposed to be realized nothing more than friends of Christian
union have at one time or another urged as practicable and desirable. By
these few and, it would seem, not incongruous combinations there would
be four powerful ecclesiastical corporations,--one Catholic and three
Protestant,--which, out of the twenty millions of church communicants in
the United States, would i