TRUE LESSON OF PROTESTANTISM 



condition of salvation. This formation of new 

 sects has gone on down to the present time, 

 and there is no reason why it should not con- 

 tinue in future ; but the period when educated 

 men, of great and original powers, could take 

 part in work of this sort has gone by forever. 

 The foremost men are no longer heresiarchs ; 

 they are free-thinkers, each on his own account ; 

 and the formation of new sects is something 

 which in the future is likely to be more and 

 more confined to ignorant or half-educated 

 classes of people. At the present day it is not 

 the formation of new sects, but the decomposi- 

 tion of the old ones, that is the conspicuous 

 phenomenon inviting our attention. The latter 

 half of the nineteenth century will be known to 

 the future historian as especially the era of the 

 decomposition of orthodoxies. People, as a rule, 

 do not now pass over from one church into 

 another, but they remain in their own churches 

 while modifying their theological opinions, and 

 in this way the orthodoxy of every church is 

 gradually but surely losing its consistency. Nor 

 is it only the laymen of whom this can be said ; 

 for the clergy every now and then set the ex- 

 ample. An eminent Congregationalist minister 

 in Connecticut, some few years since, was asked 

 why he did not go over to the Unitarians, in- 

 asmuch as he not only kept Strauss and Renan 

 in his library, but even loaned them to young 



