96. Sects then owe it to themselves, as soon as they have ful-
Zo7 The Principle of Protestantism with the whole body of which it is a part, it follows that no sect can ever do justice fully even to the single interest to which it is one-sidedly devoted.
96. Sects then owe it to themselves, as soon as they have fulfilled their historical vocation, to fall back to the general church communion from which they have seceded, as in no other way can their spiritual acquisitions be either completed or secured, and they must themselves otherwise stiffen into monumental petrifactions, never to be revisited with the warm life pulse of the one universal church.
97.
It is a cheering sign of the time that in the most different Protestant lands, and particularly in the bosom of the Reformed
Church, in which religious individualism both in the good and in the bad sense has been most fully developed, it is coming to be felt more and more that the existing divisions of the church are wrong, and with this is waking more and more an earnest longing after a true union of all believers, in no communication whatever with the errors either of Oxford or Rome.
98.
Finally, also, the liberation of the secular spheres of life from the church since the Reformation, though not the ultimate normal order, forms—notwithstanding as compared with the previous vassalage of the world to a despotic hierarchy—an advance in the naturalization process of Christianity.
99. The luxuriant separate growth of these interests, as unfolded in the Protestant states, sciences, arts, and social culture, lays the church under obligation to appropriate these advances to herself, and impress upon them a religious character.
100.
'The signs of the time, then, and the teachings of history point us not backward, but forward to a new era of the church that may be expected to evolve itself gradually from the present process of fermentation, enriched with the entire positive gain of Protestantism.
101. As the movement of history in the church is like that of the sun from east to west, it is possible that America, into whose broad majestic bosom the most various elements of character and education are poured from the Old World, may prove the theater of this unitive reformation.