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[Rev. William A. Elliott in The Biblical World]

No one will question that good has come from those early "battles of the creeds," but every student of church history can only lament that so much of the thought and time and energy of Christianity should have been expended in the warfare of words while the great world program of Jesus was lost sight of. It is my profound conviction that the policy of controversy has not carried us so far along in the work of kingdom extension as conquest would have done. We are better grounded in the faith, perhaps, but our going has been pitifully slow and pathetically indifferent. We are more orthodox but less invincible. We are sectarian in spirit and split in hopeless confusion, while otherwise we might have been united. The early churches had the faith and the religious experience and the passion for conquest and were divinely commissioned, and thus panoplied they went forth with mighty power and success; but they stopped to define, and their ecclesiastical definitions brought divisions. It is ever thus. We divide when we stop to define. Definition is important. Let us not decray it. But theological definition serves as a check to spiritual conquest.

[Rev. Joseph Fort Newton, D.Litt., in The Christian Commonwealth]

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