That the leading scholars of nearly all denomi nations, including Angelican, Lutheran, and Re formed, arc so nearly in agreement regarding the main features of apostolic church order, such as the nature of church organization, the character and functions of church officers, the number and nature of the ordinances; and that the consensus of scholarship is so nearly in accord with the Baptist position, encourages Baptists to believe that the development of Christian doctrine and practice will be in the direction of greater uniformity, and that the church of the future will more and more closely approximate the Baptist position.
Meanwhile, Baptists themselves are being in fluenced by the non-Baptist Christian life and thought of the time, and are coming to appreciate more and more all that is true and Christ-like in the teachings and lives of other types of Chris tians, to magnify the elements of agreement and to minify the elements of disagreement. They are ready to cooperate with their brethren of other denominations in all forms of philanthropy, and to a considerable extent in evangelistic and other forms of Christian work.
(4) Bar to Organic Union. It may be said, in closing, that the insuperable bar to anything like organic union, or even federation, with most other evangelical bodies of Christians is the prac tice by the latter of infant baptism, regarded by Baptists as not only without Scriptural warrant, but as a perversion of a Christian ordinance, and the refusal of the latter to conform to the mode of baptism that the scholarship of the time declares to be apostolic. Baptists do not consider these points mere matters of ritual, but rather they regard believers' baptism as an important ordi nance of Christ and a valuable means of securing regenerate church membership, which also seems to them to be a fundamental requirement of the gospel. That members of different denominations
should thoroughly understand each other's posi tion and history is indispensable to correct judg ment and intelligent charity.
(5) Divisions. The Regular Baptists of the United States are divided into three great sections —the Northern, the Southern and the Colored. These divisions affect only the home and foreign mission work of the denomination. The South ern Baptists organized separately in 1845 on ac count of the anti-slavery agitation. They have their missionary and Sunday-school organizations. The Northern Baptists unite in the work of the American Baptist Missionary Union and the American Baptist Home Mission Society. The American Baptist Publication Society seeks to serve all parts of the denomination. The Baptist Young People's Union takes in North and South alike. So does the American Baptist Education Society. The denomination has six great theo logical schools (Newton. Rochester, Hamilton, Crozer, Chicago and Louisville), colleges and uni versities too numerous to name, inclvding Brown University. the University of Chicago, Vassar College. Colgate, Rochester, Colby, Wake Forest, Denison, Franklin, Richmond. Furman. Mercer, Howard, Georgetown, Kalamazoo, Bethel, Des Moines, Central, Southwestern, Baylor and Wil ham Jewell. It has periodicals multitudinous. It has produced a literature, religious and general, that in quantity and quality compares favorably with that of the other leading denominations.