some of its leading men, but they would say: "We would
like to hear thee preach on First Day, but the rules of our society
forbid it." I have lived to see the day when I am invited to speak in
Friends' meetings, and I have rejoiced to invite Quaker brothers, and
sisters also, to speak in my pulpit. When I visit London, the most
eminent living Quaker, J. Bevan Braithwaite, welcomes me to his
hospitable house, and we join in prayer together. I wish that the
exemplary and useful Society of Friends were more multiplied on both
sides of the sea.

During the early half of the last century sectarian controversies ran
high, especially in the newly settled West. It was a common custom to
hold public discussions in school houses and frontier meeting houses,
where controverted topics between denominations were presented by chosen
champions before applauding audiences. Ministers fired hot shot at one
another's pulpits; churches were often as militant as mendicant, and all
those polemics were excused as contending most earnestly for the faith.
Both sides found their ammunition in the same Bible. When I was a
student in the Princeton Seminary, a classmate from Kentucky gave me a
little hymn-book used at the camp meetings in the frontier settlements
of his native region. In that book was a hymn, one verse of which
contains these sweet and irenic lines:

"When I was blind, and could not see,
The Calvinists deceived me."

Just imagine the incense of devout praise ascending heavenward in such a
thick smoke of sectarian contentions! All the denominations were more or
less afflicted with this controversial malady; and I will venture to say
that in Kentucky and Ohio and other new regions, the Presbyterians were
often a fair match for their Methodist neighbors in these theological
pugilistics. I might multiply illustrations of these unhappy clashings
and controversies that have often disfigured even the most evangelical
branches of Christendom. What a blessed change for the better have I
witnessed in my old days! Among the foremost efforts of denominational
fellowship was the organization of the American Bible Society, the
American Tract Society, and the American Sunday School Union. Later on
in the same century came those two splendid spiritual inventions--The
Young Men's Christian Association, and the Society of Christian
Endeavor. Sir George Williams, the founder of the one, and Dr. Francis
E. Clark, the father of the other, shou