The first national convention after the outbreak of war, meeting at Cincinnati in October, 1861, took a ten-minute recess so that its members, not as the convention but as a mass meeting, might pass a resolution of loyalty to the national government. Two years later the convention itself adopted a stronger resolution deploring the “attempts of armed traitors to overthrow our government.” But even this produced no division. It was a Northern convention because, under war conditions, there could, of course, be no representation from the South. Southerners realized that the resolution was merely an expression of Northern opinion, which they already knew; and many Northerners soon came to feel that it was a mistake for a sectional convention bearing a national name to pass a resolution purporting to express the sentiments of all Disciples, including the half of the country which could not possibly be represented. The organizational weakness of the Disciples became a strength in maintaining unity when the slavery issue and civil war threatened division, for there was no court to rule out any church or section and no convention empowered to set up standards or to pass any resolution that would have the force of law for the churches. “We can never divide!” shouted Moses E. Lard in his quarterly. If war could not divide us, he said, nothing ever can. But something could—and did. Disciples cannot divide through the exclusion of one element by another in control of denominational machinery, because there is no such machinery with power of exclusion. But it is possible to divide by voluntary withdrawal. If there is no power to put any church out, there is none to keep it in if it wants to go out. That is what happened some years later. The Period of Controversy The issues upon which division actually occurred had already arisen before the Civil War and they were so hotly debated in the years immediately after it that 1866-75 is sometimes called “the period of controversy.” The principal topics which were discussed with greater or less heat during this period were these: open or close communion; the title, “Reverend”; the “one-man system” of the pastorate; the alleged introduction of a creed; the use of the organ; and the missionary societies. Only the last two of these had any lasting importance as divisive issues. The first four merely illustrate the heightening tension between the strict constructionists and those who favored what they considered reasonable expedients to meet changed conditions.