CHURCH DIVISIONS. 343 



Church Divisions. — On still another point connected with 

 the Lord's Supper has our missionary experience in Mada- 

 gascar recalled some of the incidents in apostolic Church 

 history ; in this case, however, the evil is in the opposite 

 extreme to a superstitious reverence for the sacrament, being 

 rather a profane abuse of it, and a making it a cause of 

 division and strife between contending parties in the Church. 

 The following incident forcibly recalled to me the unseemly 

 quarrels and disputes in the Corinthian Church which were so 

 severely censured by the Apostle Paul in the eleventh chapter 

 of his Second Epistle. At a village church not more than ten 

 miles from the capital, there was a difference in opmion 

 about the election of a pastor, who, some of the people said, 

 had been forced upon them by an undue exercise of influence 

 by the chief man of the village. The Church had thus 

 become divided into two parties, whose feeling against each 

 other had at last grown so strong, that on a Communion 

 Sunday, when the Lord's Supper was about to be observed, 

 the pastor broke the bread, &c., at the communion table, 

 while the other party also brought bread and wine of their 

 own, and called to their friends to come and partake of their 

 bread and wine ; so that there were actually two communion 

 services going on at one time in the church ! It took much 

 time, several meetings, and a great expenditure of patience 

 and persuasion to reconcile the opposing parties, and induce 

 them to shake hands with each other. And yet I firmly 

 believe that several of the leaders were really Christian men, 

 and were sincerely anxious to uphold what they thought was 

 right. Their conduct really arose from their belief that the 

 independence of the Church had been wrongfully interfered 

 wdth. At another village, very near to Antananarivo, a 

 brother missionary had almost as painful a scene; for a man 

 of some position, who had been excluded for immoral conduct, 

 was enco^l^aged by those who sided with him to take the 

 bread by force, so that the table had to be " fenced " in a 

 more literal sense than Presbyterians mean when they use 

 this word in connection with the Lord's Supper. 



Yet it would be a great mistake to take these as any but 

 exceptional cases, or to conclude that there was no real 



