The Bahá’í World
Volume 1 : 1925-1926
158BAHÁ’Í YEAR BOOK 
ist minister in New York, and now he is an Episcopalian clergyman at Overbrook, Pa., yet the successive transitions have been made with no friction whatsoever, so easy has the passage been made from one Christian communion to another.
During the last decade it has happened again and again that when two churches had forgotten why they ever separated, and neither of them was able to pay a minister a living wage, they bethought themselves “how good and pleasant a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity,”—and promptly a merger ensued. Thus one of the immediate and spontaneous results of economic conditions and of the breakdown of sectarian boundary-lines is the revival of a demand for union, for the consolidation of religious forces analogous to that which has already been consummated in the industrial world.
The most recent of these mergers is that known as The United Church of Canada. After twenty years of agitation and negotiation we find that the Presbyterians, the Methodists and the Congregationalists have agreed to ignore their differences and their sectional separations for ever. This is what happened: First, the governing assemblies of these three sectarian groups endorsed the merger. Next, the individual churches voted for it by large majorities, the Canadian parliament then sanctioned it, and the Canadian courts legalized it. As a result the Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational churches as such have disappeared, and in their place stands The United Church of Canada, with an inclusive membership of two and a half million, representing thirty per cent of the total population of the Dominion.
The nearest approach to such a merger within the limits of the United States, but signalizing no less the tendency to unity, is what is known as The Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America. This was organized in 1908, and bands together twenty-eight Protestant denominations. From the latest official document of this Federal Council we learn that during sixteen years of service it has conclusively proved that “the ideal of religious unity in service is practical.”
The Federal Council, through the Commission on Social Service “carries on a steady program of helping local churches to work out any proposal for building a better community life.” Inter-racial conferences, “bringing together leaders of the white and negro people in a program of co-operative effort, have already been held in many of the leading cities.” The campaign “to create public opinion for the entrance of the United States into the permanent Court of International Justice has been pursued with such vigor that it is generally agreed that the churches are the greatest single factor in bringing this about.”
The Federal Council has established a Department of Research and Education, “in order to secure and publish the necessary data from which a correct moral judgment on contemporary issues can be formed.” Universalist leaders are just now making fresh attempts at uniting their denomination with the Unitarian, proposing a new basis upon which a consolidation may be successfully consumated. Our Episcopalian brethren have been actively engaged for the past fifteen years in laying the foundations for a worldwide fellowship of all “who accept the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Savior.” At the General Convention in 1910, it was unanimously voted to invite all churches which accept this doctrine to attend a “World Conference on
Faith and Order,” to the end that it might culminate in a fellowship “absolutely unprecedented in Christian history.” The plan was