"The tragedy of this century is the rape of the Restoration movement which was inaugurated to promote the unity of all believers, by the party spirit. . . In our fervency to rid the world of religious division, we have become one of the worst divided religious movements; in our zeal to overthrow sectism we have become sectarian."1
"The disciple brotherhood is fractured into more than two dozen splinter parties, each with its unwritten creed and its special tests of fellowship. Each one of these claims to be the church, whole and entire, perfect and wanting nothing; each regards the others as factions."2 "Even the casual reader must recognize the fearful plight of those who are 'the New Testament Church'. There is no prospect for improvement. The future holds out for these factions more strife, division, and multiplication of self-righteous partisanship. This is the fruit of carnality, of legalism and unwritten creedalism, of pride and the party spirit. How can they unite the world in Christ, while carving his body into bits? It is time for those who can do so to rise above this wicked spirit and demonstrate a love that transcends all human walls and barriers, so its warmth may dispel the chilling frost of hate. "3 "It is the essence of sectism that it measures everything by the knowledge accumulated and crystallized in the past. The interpretations, explanations, and opinions, arrived at by godly, consecrated, but fallible men, in yesteryear, become the criterion by which the worth of all contemporary reasoning must be judged. . . Dissenters, although honest, are labelled and harassed, and eventually bounded out as heretics. This has been the tragic history of sectism in all ages. "4 "Any person who studies earnestly the history of events related to the restoration movement must reach the conclusion that division is like war in that it constantly shifts the ground of our problems but never solves them. . . It is a fact that division between brethren is nowhere sanctioned in the sacred scripture as a remedy for our ills. It is the most widely practiced procedure but it is without any scriptural authority."5 "We are victims of our own philosophy. That philosophy was not so much derived from scriptures as it was contrived to meet what we regarded as abuses in the sectarian world. In our attempt to avoid and overthrow sectarianism we have been betrayed into becorning sectarian."6 "Any theory or system which embodies division among the believers as a necessary part of its constitution must be both unscriptural and anti-scriptural. The doctrine of defense by disunity, of preservation by separation, or of faithfulness by fission, is unknown to the divine revelation given to the members of the one body. God does not demand unity of the believers in one passage and sanction their fragmentation in another."7 "We are divided because we have inherited a philosophy of maintaining doctrinal purity by division among brethren."8 "The introduction of instrumental music provided for us the first real opportunity to exercise the will to divide, based on the false philosophy that the way to preserve doctrinal purity is to separate from brethren. When men are motivated by such an attitude they are doomed to division, and we will continue to divide, using first one thing and then another as an excuse..."9 "...it seems to me there are three tragic results which have accrued from our initial division.